


Forever Severed

by Joshua_Ruehadan



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark Hermione Granger, F/M, Family Proclivities, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Jealousy, Lucius Malfoy's A+ Parenting, POV Draco Malfoy, POV Hermione Granger, Pining Draco Malfoy, Plot Twists, Puberty, Questionable Usage of Legilimancy, Redeemed Draco Malfoy, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Sectumsempra is criminally underused in canon, The Draco You've Always Wanted, Torture, Unappreciated Hermione
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:47:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28868772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joshua_Ruehadan/pseuds/Joshua_Ruehadan
Summary: Fate is a fickle thing, and a single smile can catalyze a divergence of canon where Bellatrix teaches Draco a lesson that his parents never got around to… That life is full of choices, and if Helen was worth a hundred thousand men-at-arms, then surely Hermione was worth his one, measly act of defiance- This is a story that opens at the close.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Comments: 23
Kudos: 153





	1. Forever Severed (Pilot)

She's screaming.

Draco escaped from the stygian wood of the drawing room, and onto the starlit field.

He's really just such a fucking coward.

Draco knows this, intrinsically. From the moment he had the Sorting Hat in his sight, all those years ago, Draco had started down the path of cowardice. Lockstep.

It's not as if ALL Slytherins were cowards, or even that they all were destined to be dark wizards; on the contrary, Merlinus Ambrosius and Alastor Moody had both been Slytherins. But they must have made a detour somewhere down that path that he hadn't seen.

Or, maybe his journey had started earlier… from the moment he had been bounced on his father's knee. That was a comforting thought, really; almost a balm for Draco's soul.

For, if he had been damned by the very act of being fathered by a Malfoy, then perhaps there would be clemency for him in the end. That was the ticket. Potter had to be managing his escape by now, it had already been ten bleeding minutes of her suffering and, frankly…

Frankly, what? That's right, Draco. Frankly, nothing.

' _You're barely an observer here',_ certainly not a player; possessing no more autonomy in this moment than an actor charged with a particularly distasteful role. After all, what was to be done for it? He had tried, _had tried_ , to lie in the foyer. He had scrunched up his nose and narrowed down his eyes, and he had tried to say he didn't recognize them. Had tried to save them from this fate and- _but_ , there had been no saving them when the sword had tumbled out onto the floor. Draco would face reprisal for that later, he was sure- unless his demented aunt could be made to believe that his failure to recognize the three was born from the depths of apathy instead of active duplicity.

Which was unlikely, given that Bellatrix was the one that taught him how to occlude his mind in the first place. No, before the day was out, Draco would also have his turn on the hardwood floor, spasming and screeching into the abyss. The prospect shook the starlit field that was west of the jacobean manor of his ancestral seat, but also in his head. He forced his lungs to assume a cadence _not befitting a horse at full gallop_ , and reigned in his thoughts.

He was in for pain later, there was just nothing to be done about it. The Madame Lestrange was mad, yes- but not stupid. She'd meter out her wrath while she was on a roll, just as soon as Granger had been disposed of. And really, Draco had well and truly earned it this time, lying as artlessly as he had.

Like he couldn't pick out those puke green eyes from underneath the mangled wreckage of a particularly ruthless stinging jinx. As if Draco hadn't spent over half a decade looking for the golden reflection of the snitch in them- not that he ever beat him to one.

Like he couldn't pick out the putrid scarlet blemishes that could only serve to enhance Ronald Weasley's exceedingly common bone structure. As if Draco didn't envision his fucking face every time he tried and failed to cast a torture curse on a student serving a Carrows' detention- not that Draco had been able to produce one that was "any worse than my monthlies," as he had been reliably informed by a particularly incensed Hannah Abbot.

Like he couldn't pick out the matted- _savage befitted_ mane that Granger dared to call hair, as it framed the defiant set of her lips and eyes. As if some of the most exhilarating moments of Draco's life hadn't been working her up past that point- breaking her resolve and ripping tears from her eyes with biting word and malicious jinx.

That was it, wasn't it? Draco Malfoy's greatest claim to fame, the single best piece of evidence to illustrate his devotion to the Dark Lord's cause, was the tauntings he visited on a little girl who had thought she finally found a place she belonged. Because, really- what else did he have? He settled himself down in the wildflowers in his mind's eye and watched her small, delicate form waver in and out of his field of vision, obscured by the tall stalks of his occlumantic shields. This was… fine. Where he could no longer summon up the hate for her very existence, he could at least conjure a level of apathy befitting her station in his world.

She screamed again. His soul shivered. Her voice was a hoarse mewling now, no longer possessing the structural integrity necessary to be shrill. The meadow receded and he was in the drawing room again, with merely an imagined starry sky paying lip service to the abdication of his prejudices.

Bigotry is a funny thing. Common opinion holds that it is a mindset born of fear and ignorance. Of course, the commoners, as is often the case, were completely wrong. To be a proper, powerful bigot, one needn't be born into a specific caste or class. People don't rise to the heads of institutions of considerable influence by being behind the times- that was just an absurd notion. Rather, it required the complete and total understanding of different peoples' common beliefs and attributes, coupled with the overarching assertion that your way was better.

That was the root of it, at least. For example, muggles had hunted witches and wizards to the brink of extinction multiple times across the millennium. The magical world had suffered in secrecy ever since the fall of Rome. Muggleborns were a danger to this, already volatile, paradigm, because of the circumstances of their birth; they were born of muggles, and thus would always have sympathies for them whenever the next breakdown in the Statute of Secrecy occurred.

And it would occur. Everything else was just dressings on the turkey; he remembered well the words of Nott senior at the Lughnasadh that followed Draco's eleventh birthday, the month before he would set foot on the Hogwarts Express for the first time. The Lughnasadh festival was a mainstay of British pureblood culture, and principally offered up the very first fruits of the harvest to the magicks of the islands, strengthening ancestral wards and paying homage to the natural ley lines. Of course, that bit was for stuffy adults, and most school age children were more interested in the queer atmosphere of permissiveness that suffused the interactions between the, normally rigidly separated, sexes.

Lughnasadh was a time for matchmaking, for testing the boundaries of maturity and the compatibility of the parties involved. While parents drank, caroused, and rubbed elbows; they, with one hand sealed partnerships with the firm exchange of shakes, and with the other, pushed on the shoulder of their chosen heir in the direction of the viable candidates that would seal the deal. If both parents vetted a possible union as advantageous, and both parties could stand to be in each other's company without acts of physical violence, then a courtship quickly ensued. Courtships after Lughnasadh, proposal somewhere between Yule and Imbolc, wedded before Beltane- so as to ensure the speedy furnishing of an heir, of course.

Still, Draco's cohort had been a little too young for that yet, and instead they had been subjected to a primer by Theo's father on the finer points of picking out the mudbloods at Hogwarts. Afterall, there were other purebloods beyond the Sacred Twenty-Eight in Great Britain, and it wouldn't do to go mixing with the wrong sort when trying to make alliances beyond the pool of attendance in their circle. A pool that even the adults had to come to terms with being too small and imbalanced to meet the needs of the next generation. For every one Draco, there was a Daphne AND an Astoria that needed to be wed.

The stooped, sallow looking Theodore Nott senior had sat on a stone bench in the garden with the four boys who would be going off to Hogwarts together arranged in a semicircle, spellbound as he injected them with hate and vitriol.

"You'll be able to tell a mudblood just by looking at her, the wretchedness of their muggle birth leaves permanent scarring. We call them mudbloods because you can see it in their coloring, they won't have the special traits of a proper, magical family; like your eyes, Draco, or our family nose, Theodore. A muggle family almost always has common features, mousy hair and muddy eyes. They're an ugly lot, and I always say you can tell'em by the set of their teeth- never straight. The muggles also don't have our potions, so their women can't style their hair, like you all see your mums do before a festival like this. "

The assembled sons had bobbed their heads, the first born heirs of Death Eaters, all of them. They might as well have been swaddled in those heavy black robes, for, if their fathers were all Death Eaters, then their mothers were death nursers, and by the time they were weaned from that cursed mother's milk, they were sent on their way to Hogwarts to vomit out the poison that they had spent their whole childhoods imbibing.

"Remember, a mudblood will have weak magic and be too uncivilized to bear the thought of helping. They're a brutish people, those muggles, and their children won't understand our ways, and won't be intelligent enough to catch up with their peers."

Another chorus of sycophantic nods.

He could still see the caustic loathing in Nott senior's eyes as the man sat across the field, on the stone bench that had invaded Draco's occlumantic sanctuary.

"And remember, you'll know one when you see one, because she'll be too ugly to look at." He had finished the list by coming full circle to his original point, and the young Draco recorded each sign in the engraved ledger of his prepubescent brain. Mudbloods would be: ugly, magically weak, uncivilized, stupid, and ugly again.

"Please"- a gulp of air- "stop, please!" - here a sob- "It's a fake, I swear -" The rest of her wretched begging was stolen from her by the unyielding malice of Bellatrix's walnut will. Because you have to _mean it_ to cast an unforgivable, and his aunt most assuredly does. Draco couldn't fathom it, the rapturous delight the deranged woman extracted from the tortured screams of her victims. The Malfoy scion couldn't even cast a killing curse with any degree of consistancy, and he was convinced the only reason he had a proficiency with the imperious curse was because of his deep seated desire to take hold of the flaming, fucking carnival act his life had become since the Dark Lord had returned.

But that tent and ring show was distant to him now, standing as he was, on the meadow. If he turned, he knew he'd see a white stucco bothy behind him, and across the rolling hill to the right, a small lake- really no more than a pond with delusions of grandeur.

"Tell me the truth, mudblood, or I'll let that mangy halfbreed, Fenrir, fuck it out of you." Draco breath caught somewhere in his diaphragm as Bellatrix betrayed the covenant all witches held sacred amongst themselves. Draco couldn't imagine the violation a girl would feel as an older woman threatened to set a filthy animal on her in the most unthinkable way possible. He knew she would, too. He had seen it at the revels, the ones where the only witches in attendance were Bellatrix and Alecto.

Who would have guessed that the same beady eyed Nott senior, who had warned them off interacting with mudbloods entirely, had no compunction with pinning such a witch to the floorboards of his dining hall and raping her in front of the entire assembled inner circle, the _Knights of Walpurgis_. It was no great surprise that those girls, cursed with youth or beauty, rarely made it to the manor unspoiled by Snatchers or beasts like Greyback.

Draco wished he could say that watching Nott's eyes, his infernal, dehumanizing gaze, hold steady as he took a muggle girl, who couldn't have been more than 14, at the table where Draco had learned how to properly seat a young lady for dinner, was what broke him. That watching Nott's unwavering hypocrisy suffer not a stutter, but to glaze over as he finished inside his weeping victim, and the broken sobs of her father- who had been kept alive long enough to watch- had been what had finally disabused him of his prejudices.

But that would make him a liar, and not a coward. And Draco was a coward, first and foremost.

He heard a huge gulp of air over the wind in the meadow, and then the scream; "Please! Ask the goblin, ask Griphook! He'll tell you, I sweaaaaar!" Granger's proud case dissolved into a wail as the cruciatus took hold of her again. She had clearly been using the last of her strength to project the plea, not at Bellatrix… but through the manor. Through the flooring… to the dungeon.

Granger needed that pint sized banker to corroborate her story. That means that the gaudy, ruby encrusted monstrosity was real. That it was a weapon that a lieutenant of the Dark Lord had been entrusted with. That he, himself, feared! That she was lying to secure. This brilliant, stalwart, virtuous witch had been tortured within an inch of her life, and still had the presence of mind to keep fidelity with her peoples' cause. The sword was clearly of paramount value if it warranted an interrogation before an immediate call to the Dark Lord. It was an act of providence, a Merlin provided bargaining chip that no one would fault her for leveraging.

Instead, in the face of this mad woman, and the suffering that would undoubtedly continue to be visited upon her, she emerged unbowed and unbroken. Draco was unable to fight the admiration for her that swelled a warmth in his breast, so he weaved it into the meadow, a Polaris for his starry sky, and he smiled his first smile in a long time.

XXX

In another life, in a different world, Draco Malfoy does not smile at this very moment. What a small thing? A slight curling of the lips, barely more than a grin, and far from his customary sneer. In all of causality, how much could possibly be different for one smile? A fleeting countenance, born to an ephemeral sentiment that should have died, unwitnessed. This was not that time, or that place. Because, here, now, Bellatrix spares her disappointment of a nephew a glance to put him to work, and she notices.

She sees, and does not see. He really was such a disappointment, a truly hopeless cause- but wait, was that a smile? Did he… was he finally coming in to his own, in regards to the mudblood scum? Could these small embers of delight, surely lit by the treatment of the filth at her feet, be kindled into a raging inferno? She was going to send him to retrieve the goblin but… no, better to have him stay and observe. After all, this flame had to be monitored, stoked…maybe he could prove himself her true kin, yet.

"Wormy, be a dear and go retrieve the hook nose, would you?"

In a castle tower, far in the north, a divinist wearing bottle glasses began to moan out the third portent of any real veracity in her life, and a centaur that walked the green below intoned, (far more concisely,) "Thuban will be bright tonight."

Draco smiled. Fate snickered.

XXX

He is aware, in the most peripheral of ways, that Pettigrew has been dispatched to retrieve the Goblin. In the interim- well, Bella had never been one to let the vacancy of a dull moment go unfilled, especially when a target for torment was so near. The thought made him sick to his stomach, as he contemplated the similarities that must have been flitting through Granger's head between his aunt and himself. He too, had never given her any reprieve from his unceasing denigrations, and he wished he had been the one sent from the room, and… what was that look on his mother's face?

Narcissa Ursa Malfoy nee Black was visible in his meadow, standing as the tallest flower among the mustard and ivory blossoms that she took her name from. He was aware, as all boys are made aware by the arithmetic secrets that governed such matters, that his mother was a stately beauty. She was formed with the soft cupid's bow and strong cheekbones that characterized the feminine British pureblood ideal. These features were crowned with the lustrous silver eyes of the Black family, and capped with pin straight hair that had been black as night before marriage. It was, in fact, this confluence of visual factors that gave the Blacks' their proclivity for names of astronomical significance. This might have been the only change in her ageless beauty since that day, as she had gained swathes of Malfoy blond at the temple after being handfasted using the family bloodrite.

The lady of Malfoy Manor was one of refined comportment. Blessed with the Black family talents in transfiguration, divination and occlumency; Draco knew his mother to be possessing of a silverclad control over her bewitching features, to be utterly incapable of betraying herself. She was simply not the same creature in front of guests or in Diagon Alley as she was when they took tea on the eastern veranda together, as a family.

Which was why he found the disgust that befouled her face to be so striking. Where he expected to observe controlled indifference, or- at the very worst, the dismissive wrinkling of her nose she affixed when she decided to broadcast her disapproval publicly, for instance, when encountering an undesirable party at a merchant she might have previously enjoyed patronizing- he instead saw something quite worse.

Narcissa was looking at her sister's handiwork with a look of utter repulsion, as if the very continuing existence of the subject of this look was a nauseating affront to the dignity of her house, and its place in society.

The acrid scent of ammonia and unlaundered denim washed over Draco's nose then, and he thought, ' _Yes, if unadulterated terror in the face of mortal peril had a scent, it would be this.'_

The meadow wilts, the starry sky dims, and Draco follows his mother's gaze until he is no longer able to deny that she is upset with the prone form of Granger, who had the audacity to lose control of her bladder before her convictions. And so he studies her instead. She's trembling in a puddle made of her urine and tears, and her eyes are flashing defiantly- it's a look he's seen a hundred times- mudblood brown and resolute, despite it all. It's her, all of her, smelted in the crucible of their societal conflict, forged in the fires of her righteous indignation, and tempered in her own bodily fluids. Her spirit was a weapon, surely shaper and more injurious than anything a goblin could produce.

Those eyes, those eyes began to dart back and forth, to and fro now, assessing- calculating. She flits past Bellatrix, perched above her like a bird of prey, past his mother's contempt, his father's ambition, Fenrir's perverse leering and finally to him, to Draco.

Draco had never particularly cared for his eyes. He had inherited the silvery orbs of the Black family, instead of the cold, Aryan blue of the Malfoys'. They were entirely too expressive, and seemed to make a mockery of the family's fabled, prodigious occlumentic skill. Still, his barriers had kept the red slits of the Dark Lord at bay, had kept the twinkling half moons of Dumbledore at length, and would keep…

Her swirling, chocolate depths locked with his paltry offering of unburnished silver, like decadent truffles; affronted by the flatware that had been laid out by elves too lazy to polish them free of fingerprints from the wash.

He supposes she must have whispered the incantation, but he misses her lips for her eyes, like the forest for a tree, and she's wandless but a magical foci isn't strictly necessary for the mental arts, and the only place he really hears the word " _legilimens_ ," is in his soul.

Granger didn't attempt to pierce his shield or batter his psych, like a practiced legilimens would. She simply held the gaze of a sinner as he stared into the abyss of her pupils, which continued to contract down to pinpoints that Draco followed back to _her_. His conscience rubbed up against this, the sharpened tips of her resolve, and it punctured his occlumency. Emotion swelled into the breach, shame first, forming a pressure difference as the space in between his eyes exploded- and the meditative vision that made up the bedrock of his occlumency finally shattered.

* * *

"Mudbloods are magically weak."

Draco is upset and confused. He's eleven, and it's Yule, and his marks have come back, and his father had seemed so, so pleased at first… Second in his year! His mother had held him close and pressed a kiss to his cheek, a practice he publicly thought he was far too old for, but that privately didn't mind so much, and they were so, so proud. Second in a year full of the Sacred Twenty Eight and Harry Potter, himself! They had made it to pudding before they asked him how his continuing efforts to become a friend of Mr. Potter were progressing, they knew that he had felt terribly spurned by the young man at the start of the year, but they were sure that he would be more open to the idea moving forward, after all- "He'll be wanting for an intellectual equal in Gryffindor, darling" - and, really, if it wasn't the most infinitesimal of Destiny's nudgings for him to have replied with; "Actually mother, I think the Granger girl was top of the form, you know- the one I wrote to you about? Merlin knows she can't sit calmly unless every possible inquiry a professor has is fully sated, but she can do almost every charm Flitwick asks for on the first try."

The eleven year old made the admission with an almost rueful reprisal of the sparkling look that he could still see as she vibrated with excitement in his mind's eye, but the silence at the table is deafening. His mother's reaction was controlled, but his father's was disciplined, and Draco learns that there is, _there is_ , a difference between the two, but he is not the prey that is fixed in his father's gaze.

"Cissa, is she of any relation to the Dagworth-Grangers?" A sigh of resignation.

"No, darling… I've made the inquiries and there's no wizarding parentage to speak of."

His father doesn't touch him, not really- oh sure, he clasps his heir strongly at the shoulder, but you don't strike your firstborn, it's simply not done, so he makes Draco watch on as he visits flogging jinx after flogging jink on the boy's whipping elf, Dobby.

When Draco is eleven, his elf, Dobby, festers with a resentful mindset towards his wizarding family, and begins to take hold of ideas bordering on outright sedition.

Draco gains a reason to hate the mudblood, Granger- for she has ruined Yule pudding and proved Nott senior wrong.

At least she was ugly.

* * *

"Mudbloods are uncivilized."

A twelve year old Draco spits the word at her in response to her most grievous insult, and it's all he can do to do so with a sneer and not a scream.

The cacophony of indignant adolescence that fills the deepening valley between the two soothes his wounded pride; how dare she doubt that he wasn't as capable of playing seeker as her precious Potter? It isn't until he sees the glassy look in her eye that the satisfaction of feeding crow to so many hypothetical Gryffindor naysayers turns to ash in his mouth. His mother would probably scourgify his mouth for using that word in public, and he almost, almost apologizes for it- when Weasley draws on him. Draco wasn't threatened and needn't have been, as the ginger sidekick succeeds in doing nothing but cursing himself with a far worse taste than the shame that had settled on Draco's palette.

He'll crow in victory months later, hoping to recapture some of the public adulation in private with Crabbe and Goyle, boasting of his hope that the mudblood, Granger, would find herself dead at the hands of the beast of Slytherin.

It is only after she has been petrified, and revived that the truth comes to light, via the rumor mill; The Heir of Slytherin had been set the King of All Serpents, a _BASILISK_ , on the mudbloods of the school. Only dumb, stupid luck had saved the less clean population… except for Granger.

Granger had warded off death from one of the most dangerous creatures in the known world by using a hand mirror to peer around corners with. He imagined her having successfully deciphered the conundrum that had befuddled some of the greatest minds in Magical Britain, before calmly reaching into her bag, and wielding a lady's beautification device to protect her furtive, brown eyes as she darted down gothic hallways, enroute to the Headmaster to divulge her suspicions.

When Draco is twelve, his father, Lucius, gains a reason to fear the Dark Lord's reprisal, for; if Bellatrix had been his right hand, then Lucius was his left, and he had just lost an artifact he had been charged with protecting, because of Arthur Weasley's insipid raids.

Draco's hatred for the mudblood, Granger, has deepened- as she has proven the Nott senior a liar, again.

At least she was still ugly.

* * *

"Mudbloods are stupid."

One would think that it would be impossible to hold this preconception and to know Granger, personally. But a thirteen year old Draco is very young, and very bigoted, and he is grasping at straws now. Sure, she knew the answer to every question ever conceived at Hogwarts, but Father had always said that the school had been slipping since his days, and had wanted to send Draco to Durmstrang. And sure, she -a mudblood Gryffindor- had successfully divined what the monster hidden in the Chamber of Secrets was, beating out Dumbledore by several months, but Father had always said that Dumbledore was cracked anyway.

It is when Draco begs his father for revenge against the hippogriff, that he is truly forced to concede the point to the bookworm. After assembling an unimpeachable legal defense for Buckbeak that is presented to a Wizengamot subcommittee, for a court system she doesn't know the first thing about, she forces his father to turn to coercion to ensure an execution.

Which is when she, in a manner most befitting a Malfoy, cheats and saves the beast from the fabled Death Eater Walden McNair's, executioner axe.

She has outsmarted his father, Lucius Abraxas Malfoy, and even taken a second out of her busy time table, in the middle of pulling off the con, to punctuate her utter dominance with a slap that made his ears ring. The simmering rage in her dirt-colored eyes would have been home in a valkyrie, and that, far more than the slap, is what prompts him to turn tail, and withdraw.

When Draco is thirteen, Hermione learns that an indomitable will is the only way she will survive in this new world.

Draco's hatred for the mudblood, Granger, has reached its zenith- as she has proven Nott senior a complete fool.

At least he could still convince himself that her bushy hair and beaver smile made her ugly.

* * *

"Mudbloods are ugly"

The mudblood, Granger, was a year older than him, and it shows. Puberty has begun to work a magic all its own on Draco's peers, but it's art is almost done on her. When he sees her, wrapped up in the green and white livery of Ireland's national team, it's all the fourteen year old boy can do not to stare at the licentious temptation of the girl-no, the _woman_ in the mockery of his house colors. The delicate lattice worked scaffolding sways underneath him as the Malfoy scion's world swayed with it.

For surely, this cannot be Hermione Granger? Her hair is longer now, the weight of it domesticating the chestnut curls, finally bereft of any bangs to hide her dainty face. Her smile is different now, he's seen it first as she whispered into the youngest Weasley's impoverished ear; it's a woman's secret smile, the kind only recognizable by the upturned corner of a pouty lip, made all the more wicked as her front left tooth caught her wind chapped bottom lip to stifle a laugh at her friend's response.

Really, it's all Draco can do not to make a disgrace of himself right there and then in his trousers, and of course- there it is, his father's pithy quip about their inferior seats. Thank you, father- Draco had been wondering how he was going to draw her attention to the evidence of his burgeoning masculinity. He was positive she'd appreciate the new manner that he'd taken to combing his blond fringe with, it looked rather dashing in concert with the sable, muggle suit and turtleneck he had donned for the occasion, even if Draco did say so himself.

But, ah, there was her look of indolent rage. As if she was above dispensing the simmering disdain she had brewed in her brown depths for him, Malfoy, and his paterfamilias. He's cowed and confused, and although he does a good job of imitating his father's affectation, his world has been permanently set to turn on a different axis. So lost was the pubescent boy to his inner turmoil, that the silky blond, perfectly proportioned charms of the Bulgarian veelas are completely wasted on him.

Fortifying his occlumantic barriers, Lucius Malfoy is only vaguely embarrassed by the preening idiot of a man that purported to be the Minister of Magic, and very concerned with his son. A young man on the cusp of adulthood should be, well… acting like the Minister currently was, boasting and flexing in the general direction of the scintillating creatures on the field. His only son and heir seemed… rather bored with the whole display. Almost disappointed, actually. Lucius is a logical man, and his mind immediately goes to the most likely answer, that his only son bludgeons for… the other team, so to say.

Lucius has no immediately negative thoughts on the matter, after all- it was something of a family proclivity if Armand Malfoy's portrait was anything to go on, and- really, as long as a proper marriage could be worked out, so as to procure a pureblood heir, what did it matter? Maybe Draco would take after his ancestor and wind up buggering another country conquering royal, and the Malfoy family would wind up with a new palatial estate? Come to think of it, that was another Malfoy family proclivity, muggle royalty, according to Lucius Malfoy the first's unceasing carrying ons about the "Virgin" Queen of England.

Narcissa is a mother, of course, and so reads her son as only a mother can. She looks at the mirror of the face she has spent an entire marriage deciphering, different only in the changes she has wrought herself, in the core of her being. She observes the vacant set of his pale eyebrows, and the disinterested puff of air he issues from his nostrils; this all paints a picture her husband is interpreting too, but… one so juxtaposed to the shuffling of his legs as he readjusted a growing problem, so endemic to boys of his age.

But, there! The narrowing of the Black eyes to silver slits as he fixed the predator stare, not on the field, but on a sky box above, and to the left of them. The cadence of his breathing audibly changes, (so much like his father when he's finally found himself alone with Narcissa, at the end of a long engagement, and looking to be unzipped from her gown,) and she traces the burning path of her son's gaze.

When Draco is fourteen, his mother, Narcissa, is disgusted to find that her son is impervious to the allure of the magical creatures designed to enchant him, only because he has already been bewitched by Potter's pet mudblood.

Draco's hatred for the mudblood, Granger, has burnt itself out, and he finds himself angry with her only twice in the coming year. Angry for the hurt look in her eye as he warns her, _in the best way he could_ , by questioning her modesty in the face of the rapacious terrorist attack that happened later that very night. The thought of her taken advantage like that- _of anyone but Draco seeing her like that_ \- makes him seethe, and the knowledge that she probably thought differently made it worse.

He's only angry like that once more that year, and it's when he sees her descend the staircase on her way to the Yule Ball. He can find nothing to say in front of the company about her appearance, or her new admirers. He'll realize, much later that night,(after fobbing off Pansy,) that he is upset because she has potioned her hair and shrunken her teeth, and it has taken a deviation from how her muggle parents have made her for their classmates to realize just how beautiful Hermione is.

Draco now knows that Nott senior has lied to him, lied to them all.

* * *

The Dark Lord has returned, and a fifteen year old Draco, quite frankly, couldn't be bothered with him.

He was far too enamored with his mudblood to care. Oh, sure, it was fun enough to rile Potter, but- "... dogging your footsteps?" Really? That was all it took to wind him up? If Draco didn't know better, he'd think the Prophet had it right, and the Boy-Who-Lived-to-annoy-him had finally cracked under the weight of his own self delusions.

The deference his father paid the Dark Lord seemed ridiculously out of proportion to services rendered, so to speak. Why Draco should have to play minion to that absolute blight to the gothic landscape, Umbridge, was lost on him. He wasn't a servant- have Crabbe or Goyle play sympathetic ear to her inane ramblings… And of her touches… the less said, the better. Comparatively, even Pansy's attentions were bearable.

The way Warrington and Montague had it, having the attention of a witch on your arm made it more likely for another to fancy you. Draco had thought it highly fortuitous that they'd all made prefect, Draco, Pansy… and Hermione.

He could no longer call her Granger, at least in his head. It was too impersonal, too distant for her starring roles in his recurring, lurid adolescent fantasies. He hasn't touched himself to a witch with blond or red hair since he started wanking, and he's always finished hardest when the animated brunettes of Blaise's Playwizard wore curls. Gryffindors and Ravenclaws had their respective towers' panoramic splendor, but the Puffs and the Snakes got private dorms after third year, and Draco has tested the fortitude of his privacy wards on a daily basis; Granger just wasn't long enough a name to stutter over between the ragged breaths that marked the culmination of his nightly routine, and _he knows that now_.

So it's Hermione. Variety might be the spice of life, but routine is the lube on his cock; this being the only rationale that he can fabricate in the fleeting moments of post orgasmic shame that almost always followed his daily adoration of her. His obsession.

But it's a good routine, and it gets him hard enough to swing at bludgers every time. The Slytherin prefect's favorite fantasy went as follows; he'd report to his patrol route for the 10p.m. curfew, only to find that his partner for the evening had been serendipitously replaced by Hermione. He'd start off, cool, calm and collected, and strike up a conversation with her over a particularly interesting bit of trivia, only tangentially related to something covered in a shared class. The little swot would be hesitant at first, but she'd eventually be unable to resist the urge to mount the lectern she kept perpetually stuffed up that pert little arse. Merlin knows, she must be dying for intelligent conversation with the company she kept. He'd engage her, play Morgan's advocate and summon up a counterpoint. Get her to, at least acknowledge an alternative historical perspective or academic line of reasoning.

She'd be wary, of course… at first. But Draco knows he's attractive enough, for his age, and also rather well spoken. He'd tap into her urge to lecture, after all, she was always so eager to put the fruits of her academic toils on display, as if each line recited verbatim was a piece of evidence that served to prove that she _belonged at his school_. That she had a place here. Draco rather agrees, and that place was underneath him. And so it would go, he'd turn the conversation from there to something only slightly more personal, perhaps the book she'd last read for pleasure, or a date he had recently found to be particularly disappointing.

Then he'd begin flattering her. "Oh, well that sounds remarkably like the novel I just completed last month;" "Yes well, one does get tired of all that pin straight hair, it comes off as artificial as the witch underneath it… don't you agree, Hermione?" He'd do it like that, slide in her name like it's drawled off his tongue a hundred times, _because it has_ , and she'd turn pink at his inflection. After all, the only way he knows how to annunciate her name is with a wanton passion, and he's sure it sounds an order of magnitude more enticing coming from him than that illiterate fool, Viktor Krum.

She's too quick and too clever to let that go unnoticed, and she'll try to call him out on it.

But Draco is prepared for this moment, and she'll be unbalanced, both by the flattery, and by the tone he's used to caress the vowels of her name.

"Well, that's your name, isn't it? After the daughter of Helen, a woman of such beauty that her loss launched over a thousand ships to war?" That would get her, feint, dive, and snitch. He bet there wasn't a single wizard in Gryffindor Tower that knew the first bleeding thing about the Trojan Wars. She'd be flushed with color then, if she wasn't already so by his attentions. Her debut the year prior had definitely not gone unnoticed by the male population of Hogwarts, but they were entirely too scared of her own red and gold patterned Crabbe and Goyle bodyguards.

Of course, those two were either a step below half witted, or too pigeon-hearted to edge the other out, and as such, Hermione's natural desires to be pursued by a wizard were woefully unmet. She'd most likely sputter out some rejoinder centered around his "previous opinions" of her, and he'd go for broke by pulling off his greatest deception to date; telling her "that he'd gotten more enjoyment out of this last hour of conversation than any broom cupboard excursion with a pureblood that he could remember."

After all, the greatest lies were just fragments of the truth, told advantageously; Pansy's complete and utter failure to keep track of her teeth when on her knees and polishing his knob was a fact.

He'd say that, while holding her gaze and invading her space, and she'd be done. Her need for intellectual validation would be so supremely satisfied that it would sit back, and let her needs as a witch mount the hippogriff, so to speak. Everything after that was by the numbers, after all- where would their rounds end, but in the dungeons? "A gentleman would walk you back to your Dormitory, but oh, Hermione! Let me go get that novel I mentioned earlier, I think you'd like it- have you ever been inside the Slytherin common room before, it's underneath the lake, and really rather fascinating…" She'd worry her luscious bottom lip here, and protest at the implicit rule breaking, forgetting entirely the impropriety of the proposition.

"Ah, just as well- you'd be the first muggleborn to step foot in there in… Merlin knows how many years?" It was three hundred and three years, Draco had checked, and he bet she had too.

She'd spit the number out with scorn, then fix him with that _look_. The one he first saw right before she struck him, two years prior. And in that moment, as simmering rage finally boiled over the cauldron walls of her self control, he'd clasp his fingers firmly around her wand hand, and gently tug her into the room. Take the fire of her righteous indignation out from underneath the bubbling brew, and what was left?

Across the jade lit common room, down the corridor on the right, fifth passage to the left, last door on the oblique end of the tunnel. She would still be processing those emotions as he led her along, and by the time the lock on his door clicked into place, he'd be upon her.

By this point in his fantasizing, he'd be rock hard at the end of his rounds, weeping precum and tugging his robes across his torso until he could complete the fantasized journey, alone… but wanting. And he wanted her, just like that. Wet, and soft, and quivering underneath him, as her body committed treachery against her mind; betraying all of her allegiances by lifting her regulation length uniform skirt and spreading her legs for her best friend's nemesis. He'd divest himself of his robes like he was practicing his ' _evanesco'_ , and pumping himself to whatever model he could find that looked the most like her in his newest acquisition from Zabini.  
But that alignment of the stars (and the rota,) never occurred.

So he joined the Inquisitorial Squad. If fortune favored the bold half as much as Dumbledore seemed to, he'd eventually get the opportunity he was waiting for with her, whenever Umbridge finally zeroed in on their little insurrection. In the interim, he got to wear the silver I, preen like one of his father's peacocks, and dock points from whoever didn't clear out of his way fast enough. Not a bad deal, as they go. He'd have her, eventually. It was destiny that she be underneath him. That was her lot in life. Hermione Granger would belong to Draco Lucius Malfoy, an uppity mudblood kept as a pet by the patronage of the Malfoy family.

Of course, by the time he is able to strike at an opportunity, like an adder in the tall grass, it is almost the end of term and the situation has gotten completely out of control.

He catches the little Weasley chit, screaming her ginger head off about "Garroting Gas," and rather than take the bait, he proceeds in the opposite direction of her diversion with Bulstrode in tow, stumbling on Hermione first, then Potter.

His patience has finally been rewarded. Draco has bested his mudblood's machinations and caught her in flagrante delicto, making a call to their crackpot of an old headmaster! Finally she'd see him as he was, a _Pureblood_ , a _Malfoy_ , a _Scion of the Sacred Twenty-Eight_. He hesitates but for a moment, he needs to see it; to look into her eyes as her molten, cocoa wrath finally subsides into the hearth-warm umber of acknowledgement. Instead, he's barely completed the mental revisions to the monologue he is sure will prompt his witch to raise her gaze from the flagstone floor, before Millie reappears with aforementioned crackpot's replacement in tow.

Bulstrode is given the order to restrain her by Umbridge, and it's all Draco can do to not gnash his teeth at the missed opportunity being squandered by Millicent, as SHE pushes _his_ mudblood against the wall with an uttered threat.

Then there's more Gryffindors, Snape prevaricating, casual threats of torture, and really, far too much company for Draco to be paying the slippery witch the adequate amount of attention she deserves…

And then she's crying, and Draco doesn't believe her for a second, so he presses his luck and pleads with the pink abomination to let him tag along as Hermione leads her on what will undoubtedly be a stunning reversal of fortune. The bitch postures and denies him, and over the irritating, nail on chalkboard overestimation of her position; Draco sees it. The look.

Between the fabricated sobs and splayed, ink stained fingers, he sees the defiance burn in Hermione Granger's dry eyes. And he stops worrying about how badly Umbridge is fucked, and begins to worry about himself. For, he is so distracted by the memory of her brown eyes- how was he the only one? What was more pressing? Why would he ever wish to possess her, _like an object_ , when she looked like that as she connived her way to freedom?

So distracted was Draco, that **Ronald Weasley** was able to mount an escape, leaving the Inquisitorial Squad stunned, disarmed, and in the Malfoy heir's personal case, beset upon by his own boogies. By the time he has been restored by Severus and is left to convalesce in the comfort of his own room, Draco is hard for her again, and spends the remainder of the night masturbating to the visage of Hermione Granger, superimposed across one particular centerfold, and aglow with the inner fires of victory that he had found only in the hot, earthy undertones of her eyes.

That's how his Head of House finds him the next day, covered in his own spunk and shame.

Severus has come to tell him of his fathers arrest at the hands of the Order of the Phoenix… and his classmates.

When Draco is sixteen, his aunty Bella has learned that the new generation must be relied upon to carry on her Dark Lord's noble mission… and that the little, curly haired mudblood is really too uppity for her own good.

Draco has learned that the sins of the father are, indeed, inherited by the son.

* * *

He's sixteen the next time he permits himself to think of her like that again. He's learned occlumency in the interim, and is thankful for it. If Bellatrix had noticed his fascination with the mudblood as she battered his psyche over the summer, she hasn't mentioned it. Besides, if what he's seen at the revels is any indication, he couldn't be the only Death Eater that tossed off to muggle girls.

It helps that he's channeled his passion for her, turning his ardor into hate, for she is the one that has put his father in chains… _not that he didn't have it coming_.

Draco could no longer begrudge her for the animosity towards his father, after all- the boy, who is not quite a man, has been branded like livestock, and had his mother abused in his presence, because of the precarious position Lucius has left his family in.

He took his mark like a wizard, and was proud for it. The Malfoy heir was the de facto lord of his household now, and he took to his duties like he had been preparing a lifetime for them-because he had. No one had ever faulted his thoroughness before, and by the time he boarded the Hogwarts Express in September, he is comforted by the multitude of plans he has already set into motion.

And why shouldn't he be? He is, after all, the youngest Death Eater to ever be marked, and the confidences of the Dark Lord were not misplaced. He cowed the impertinence of Zabini with a single upward sweep of his robe sleeve, and if Pansy seemed put off by the new addition to his flesh, all the better. She was _truly_ insufferable... And there's the star of the show, _Hello, Potter!_

Having the "Chosen One" at his mercy, in a _full body bind_ , under his boot-heel, should give Draco a rush of glee. But he doesn't drop his occlumency, even for a moment; preferring to crush the boy's nose from his view of the Manor's western meadow. He leaves him there for them both to stew, Potter in his own blood and mucus, Draco in his fit of juvenile pique; for what did that accomplish? He didn't feel any better for it, and Potter's absence would assuredly be noticed then immediately rectified.

It takes another seven months and two failed attempts on Dumbledore's life for the reality of Draco's circumstances to fully set in. There had always been nagging doubts of course, flirting at the very edges of his conscious thoughts… but those had been well and truly repressed by the meadow. The damage to his occlumantic barriers begins after his first attempt on Dumbledore's life- well, really his second. The mulled wine, that Slughorn hated but that the headmaster loved, was a bit of a long cast- the cursed opal necklace was really the opening volley and it hit. Not its target, but someone had ended up in StMungo's over it…

The feint opened up a wealth of opportunity as the eyes of the ministry were turned, even more strongly, towards weapons poised to penetrate the castle, rather than items that were already in it. When Draco learns that he's almost killed a Gryffindor mudblood instead of that cracked, senile, poofter- he ducks into the closest loo on the second floor and meets the ghost of Myrtle Warren. She doesn't make herself known until he's quite done with his panic attack, and her comforting words are the very first time Draco learns what it means to be given something by a peer without the expectation of reciprocity.

She's a mudblood, and dead besides… but dead witches tell no tales, and he begins to outline his problem, in only the vaguest generalities.

A childhood of lies, an impossible task, a mother held hostage. Over the months he tells her everything, and nothing at all- and Myrtle becomes the boy's first real friend. He chances, only once, to divulge the jealousy he was consumed with when he happened upon McLaggen's wandering hands- and really, if it wasn't a credit to his efforts that he manages to work a delaying effect into the regurgitating hex that paints Severus's brogues with the kisses he **dared to steal** from…

Meadow. Bothy. Lake. Open, blue sky. Hold.

The key to any good occlumentic exercise isn't in the vividness of the mental image, it was in the image's capacity to excuse the intrusion of emotional stimuli. He learns that in this, he is sorely lacking, and he has blown up over half the sinks in Myrtle's bathroom before he figures that out.

When Weasley imbibes in the poisoned wine and almost dies, the revulsion that suffuses Draco tells him, for certain, that his situation is futile.

Regret over Bell is understandable, the girl is so similar to _**her**_ that he excuses the lapse in fortitude. But if Draco cannot even bear the thought of sending Weasley to the Hospital Wing without hyperventilating in the fetal position, well… maybe he's not quite cut out to be a Death Eater. When the muggleborn (because by Beltane he can no longer think of Myrtle as a mudblood,) ghost wraps her cold, spectral form around him in comfort, Draco tweaks his occlumantic trance, swapping a noonday sky for the crisp, familiar comfort of a starry night… Besides, he's always liked astronomy, and this mental image proves to be far more durable.

It safeguards him from Snape's intrusive efforts and he's able to focus on the task at hand, making more progress on the cabinet in one month than he has in the entire preceding term. The key, Draco learns, is just to let those pesky thoughts flow away, and he does just that- he bundles up the opal necklace, the tainted mead, his mother's face, even McLaggen's **fucking** **hands** … and puts them each on a shooting star.

He watches them fall out of the sky, blazing trails of color that lead them farther and farther away, over hill and out of sight.

And, really that works until he sees Potter interrogating Bell in the middle of the Great Hall and he just. can't. bundle. her. face. up. quick. enou- Eyes as green as his master's killing curse find his guilt in a sea of a hundred innocents, and the hunt is on.

He runs because it's the only thing he knows how to do, and because his failure will mean his mother's life, and because he's not quite sure Potter will leave him alive long enough to see it.

Draco has barely gathered his breath from his impromptu flight enough to properly start on gasping sobs when Potter finds him, driven as he is to new levels of hysteria by the sight of his own visage in the mirror. Perhaps his rival doesn't know how to feel, finding Draco as he does, crying tears of repentance to the soothing empathy of a muggleborn ghost.

But it's not as if Draco is thinking rationally at this point, and like a prey animal when confronted with a predator wielding a weapon and a map, he lashes out in the blind hope that he can escape, as the only living wizard to continuously survive his lord's ire is standing between the Dark Lord's sacrificial lamb and escape, and the irony would be stark in any other circumstance- but it isn't and it's lost to them both, so Draco lets loose a knockback jinx with the non-verbal competency of a duelist who has spent the past year wreaking property damage on all manner of porcelain basins.

But Potter didn't survive crossing wands with the Dark Lord twice by being slow on his feet, and he's ducking and returning fire with a non-verbal banishing charm that smashes out a mirror before Draco can even process the thought that Potter is much more practiced at this than him.

So he retrea- _repositions_ by pulling Potter further into the bathroom, and slides down to the ground, behind the cover of the stalls, before attempting to take his enemy unawares with a blasting curse- a mistake quickly rectified as the novice Death Eater is forced to jack knife up and away from a blue jet that obliterates the columned sink he had been resting against. Draco had cast _confringo_ and is honestly disappointed when Potter choses to respond with the blue jet of what he guessed to be an _expulso_ , the largely non-lethal variety of explosive curses, and occlumency is a distant fucking memory as Draco is consumed with a rage hotter than his last, orange cast.

Did Potter think this was a game? That he could just keep Draco a prisoner here long enough for a professor to give him a detention? That the first _evate_ _statum_ had been anything but a warning shot, meant to clear a path of egress by an enemy combatant?

It is this anger that he finally, _finally_ understands what auntie Bella meant when she told him, "...you've got to mean it, Draco…" in the haunting tone of a child who delighted in showing off her favorite toy.

He's barely halfway through the incantation before Potter's curse hits him.

The blood pumping through his eardrums keeps him from hearing the duel ending spell, but that's a temporary problem, as his blood is soon all over the floor. He's lying in a pool of water from the ruins of the sink, slowly being refined by the addition of his pure blood, and he hears Myrtle screeching, not moaning, out her condemnations of the Boy-Who-Lived.

He spends the next dozen hours fading in and out of consciousness, and he learns that Severus was able to pull him back from the very precipice of the veil, but not soon enough to save him from a permanent reminder of his folly. All cursed wounds carry the remnants of dark magic, and Potter had struck well, cleaving him nearly in twain from right hip to left collarbone.

"You were lucky," Severus had informed him, "that you could be saved at all."

That Potter was so inadequate a wizard that the damage was reversible. That even so, it had bit almost completely through his ribcage and sternum. That Snape had been the first professor to respond, and one of the few on faculty who was proficient enough in healing magic to save him with wandwork alone.

That his mission was still viable, because Snape had the good sense to glamour the boy's left arm before he was turned over to Pomfrey. That he should bear this scar as a reminder of the sheer feats of idiocy he had demonstrated this year. The boy had managed a bloody gurgle at the irony, permanently scarred by the great Scar Head, himself. He could have sworn, although he must have imagined it, that he was visited at dusk by both Dumbledore and Pansy, but that made no sense-and thus had to have been a hallucination, borne of blood loss.

Draco was, conversely, quite certain of the physical presence of his next visitor.

It was a gentle inquiry from behind him that dragged his potion addled thoughts to clarity, although he was incapable of placing it, turned as he was, on his left side with his back to the door.

"How are you feeling, Malfoy? I suppose that's a ridiculous question…" The witch trailed off. The sound of her voice was sweet, and that makes him even more confused… it was much too young to be a professor and not nearly shrill enough to be Pansy's.

"I don't even know what I'm doing here… surely I'm the absolute last person you would expect to be visiting your bedside." She finished that with an incredulous snort, as if the visitor with a voice like honey was sharing a private joke that only they knew.

Not Myrtle then, or even his cousin, Nymphadora, who stalked the perimeter of the castle, scornfully suspicious of the nephew of the shared aunt who had sent her to the hospital last June.

_Who are yo-_

"It's just that… this is all my fault, you see... I told Harry! I told him months ago that that book was nothing but trouble. But he's been possessed of this, this ridiculous notion that Voldemort has made you a Death Eater!"

He's figured out who she was by the time she got around to the name, and understood immediately his previous difficulty with the task.

You see, Draco Malfoy had never heard this particular voice address him with such a soft tone, and it is only the ruthless condemnation she pours onto Potter's given name that betrays the identity of his visitor.

Hermione Granger has broken into the Hospital Wing, after curfew, to visit him in his sick bed. The shock of it all washes over his limbs, freezing his feigned sleep in a paralysis of pins and needles.

"He's even claiming that you were about to use an Unforgivable on him, as if he seriously believed that this stunning example of hypermasculine bravado masquerading as a duel, was worth a lifetime in Azkaban to you… Of course this lunacy was immediately validated by Ginny; tell me, are men even capable of understanding a string of words that come from a woman's mouth if they haven't had their tongue down her throat?" She spat the sentiment out like his father might have spat out a wine that had vinegared, as if the very breath had turned sour on her palate.

It takes until this moment for Draco to realize something that's been apparent since the beginning. Of all the people in this castle, and indeed, Great Britain- the only two who have offered him a shred of defense were… Myrtle and Hermione. He's been offered as a token of fealty by his father and aunt to the Dark Lord, set to task by threats on a despondent mother, doubted by Snape, ignored by Dumbledore, and cut down by the Chosen One, Harry Potter.

And it was, in the end, two muggle-born witches that showed any degree of magnanimity for his position. They were able to look at him, a living culmination of centuries of privilege and prejudice, with… sympathy? Myrtle had called Potter a murderer, and Hermione didn't believe her best friend's account was even reliable.

This was his chance. The moment he had been waiting for. She was here, alone with him. He needed to turn over and tell her… ' _tell her what?'_ The insidious voice of doubt was back, creeping across the inside of his eyelids and into his unprotected mind...

' _That she was wrong? That he was a marked Death Eater? That he had already put no less than three of her friends in mortal peril? That he had tried to use an Unforgivable on Potter? That he had spent the year letting his marks and mental health deteriorate in an effort to deal a decisive blow in the conflict that would end, most favorably for her, in exile or sexual slavery; the latter of the two being the outcome he's fantasized about for as long as he's been old enough to figure out what to do with his erection?'_

The sudden urge to escape, to run away, so stay, to do whatever it takes to hear her speak sweetly to him again is overwhelming. He is confronted now with two unfathomable pieces of knowledge he's firmly locked away for almost a year; Hermione Granger is at her most stunning when she's as free as her Hippogriff, and how similarly wounded she'd leave him.

For, in admitting to himself, that most outrageous of creatures to lie to, that he adored her- not despite, but _because_ of her muddy brown features, and her exotic heritage, and her flaming scorn, and her underserved compassion- he has tacitly acknowledged that he has fallen in only the deepest of loves with her that a mortal man is capable of.

And so his entire world has changed, and also nothing. His mother is still a prisoner in her own home, Draco is still guilty as sin, and the Dark Lord was still well positioned to win the war after, what was essentially just, a decade and a half of false reprieve.

It's all rather meaningless actually, Potter couldn't even finish Draco off, there was absolutely no way Draco would be able to finish Dumbledore off, and he can't fathom a course of action where he could manage to be a better man for her, and could scarcely refrain from being a worse one. He was saved only by the knowledge that his affections would probably prohibit him from scraping enough hate together to cast a killing curse that would ever strike a person she cared for.

He might be laid out now, but he was on the road to perdition still, make no mistake- it was a road he had set down from the very moment the Sorting Hat had rendered its verdict, and the ruling was as clear as the Wizengamot sentencing he now so desperately hoped he'd live to see at journey's end: Damnation.

He doesn't roll over or open his eyes as she wishes him well, and the tears that rise from his anguish at the sound of her retreating form has nothing to do with regrets stemming from the events of this evening, for he does not need to have caught her eyes tonight to see them, he knows now that he will be haunted by those brown depths for the rest of his life.

When Draco is sixteen, his mentor, Severus, learns that the boy is incapable of casting a killing curse, and so passes the sectumsempra to him, knowing that he was gifting a weapon that would never be abused for evil ends.

Draco learns that he is a coward. And he never stops revisiting this lesson, every day, for the next year.

* * *

Draco can see she's been dragged out of the sea of his memories by the renewed attentions of Bellatrix, who had exchanged her wand for a ritual knife, and was screaming obscenities with unwavering vigor.

Apparently she'd cottoned on to what Hermione had been doing when the girl had stopped responding to the cruciatus, and had taken offense to the idea that his occlumency was being so thoroughly tested.

"How dare you, how DARE you, you filthy, little, mudblood- attempt to invade the mind of the scion of a Pure Blooded house? A mind I have, MYSELF, secured?"

She continued on like this as she began to carve into the object of Draco's undying devotion, reinvigorated by the tune of her victim's new screams.

"You will never, EVER, again forget what you are, girl- for however long your putrid cunt can be used to service your betters!"

He sees now, the loopy _M_ begin to take form on the creamy backdrop of her inner arm, and is hard pressed to decide if he's more nauseated by the sight of her mutilation or the year of his continued cowardice.

The watering of his mouth and the chattering teeth are the tell tale precursor of retching, Draco would know, he hasn't had a proper appetite in years, and his body seemed to only be able to conjure this much saliva when he was to be sick and… and what?

Nothing has changed. Nothing has become better. His family was in no safer a position now than it had been last year, and the abuses of the Malfoy household showed no signs of slowing, and Draco has fucked up any and all chance of stealing the glory of this capture from the Snatchers responsible when he misidentified Potter and…

As his mad aunt stopped to survey her evil handiwork, Draco realizes that there's no road at all.

Life wasn't a path, it was a forest that you could only move forward in.

Life was… life was full of choices, and there was always a choice, and he chose this, he chose and he chose and not all choices are the same, but some matter more than others, and he has the scars to prove it.

The deep breath he takes drags the starry sky and the meadow back by the fingernails of his sanity. He had always had the choices, had the most of them, of any of his peers, in fact.

Except with her. He'd probably been doomed to love her from the moment she had slapped- Had it really only been a slap?- it had felt like a chisel she had taken to his very soul.

And now she knew, she had seen and felt the yearnings of his soul, the rapturous torture of his existence. He revered her like an uncultivated wildflower on his family's property. She was a feat and feature of nature, ephemeral and exquisite, but undomesticated and immovable. Never truly his to pluck and cherish. But what good could come of her knowing the depths of his feelings?  
He wants to retreat further back in his mind, perhaps to the bothy… where none of this could touch him. Otherwise, he'd be doomed to die with her, today- he knows now that the line of Malfoy would end with her death, as assuredly as with his. He wished, desperately, for another choice, a new crossroad, a second chance to avail himself of the horrors he himself has played no small part in inflicting on their world. Permanent harm, like a curse… like a scar.

' _No!'_

The voice returned, and he realized his conscience sounded awfully like Severus; ' _Look around, survey the situation beyond the flowers…'_

Bellatrix is apologizing for getting mudblood all over his mother's hardwood, his mother is whispering into his father's ear, whose brow was furrowed in consternation, Fenrir is licking exaggerated passes across his maw, like the sight of Hermione splayed out and violated before him was enough to prompt a lunar change…

Draco doesn't look at her, doesn't need to- he had been right, her eyes had never really left his mind anyway. His pale hand stole across his diaphragm to unbutton the short, stylish black robes he had taken to wearing after getting marked. It didn't relieve his shortness of breath.

His aunt's knife hand twitched with malicious intent, and Draco is left with choices as the flashing silver reminds him of a conversation with his Head of House that now made far more sense…

' _Let the Gryffindors keep their goblin forged, offense to good taste. We have our own swords, principally the very curse that was so ineffectually turned on you, Draco. It is a spell of near limitless potential… Know this, I've chosen to impart this technique on you for no better reason than that your continued deficiency in emotional magic has become a glaring vulnerability to your life… , and therefore, mine.'_

A tweak of an eyebrow, the dismissive flick of the potion master's wand, the whispered incantation; these were the only warnings the elder tree at the edge of the Malfoy Park was given before it had been cleaved in half.

The visible awe must have been evident, as his mentor had continued on that day with the ghost of a smile on his countenance.

_The Sectumsempra curse is a vorpal blade that grows more potent with the caster's clarity of purpose. It is more suited to the cold detachment of a skilled occlumancer, rather than a blustering imbecile, tripping over his own passion.'_

Draco had nodded that day in understanding. Potter's lack of focus had been the only reason he hadn't ended up bisected like the tree; which had slid apart at its new, diagonal seam, lacking the structural integrity to support itself.

Severus had made him cast until he could replicate those effects, till he had bent the unicorn-hair core of his wand to accept the dark magic he was channeling through it.

' _There remains one more lesson for today, Draco… Surely, by now, you have worked out the latinic roots of the incantation to be "forever sever?" This curse is one of my own creations, and try as I might- I've never been able to devise a countercurse to it. A general healing charm that is performed by a wizard of prodigious skill, who casts thrice over the wound will be able to turn back the damage, as you might recall… But when properly cast, this curse will forever sever flesh and bone, bisecting limb or torso in such a way that there is no remedy. When you cast this curse, you must do so with resolve in your decision, Draco… am I understood?'_

Draco had nodded his assent that day, but he had been lying. Or, more charitably, had only now come to a full understanding of his mentor's meaning. That life was full of choices, and the choices you make with this curse could never be undone.

In the meadow, Polaris twinkled as Draco Lucius Malfoy made a decision.

His fingers wrapped around the dark hafted hawthorne length in his inner breast pocket.

Bellatrix's left hand twisted and dark magic spilled forth from the wand, slamming Hermione's curled up form, supine again. The knife in her right hand descended.

_Choices._

When he had Dumbledore at his mercy, his wand hand had been trembling in the night sky like a storm caught dinghy in the open ocean.

_Decisions._

Draco's hand is steady as stone now. He takes that as a good sign. He bet Paris's hand had trembled when he stole away with Helen of Troy, the poor fool. Who would choose anyone else when they had already been promised Hermione of Sparta? If Helen was worth a hundred thousand men-at-arms, then surely Hermione was worth his one, measly act of defiance-

The knife tip is a hair's breadth from skin now-"Don't think I've forgotten about you, after all, we've got to finish up here so that the hooknose doesn't feel-'"

He's drawn, and the oxblood tip of his wand has cleared his dark raiment.

He hears his mother shout his name, but that's already bundled up and away, on the tail of a comet. There's nothing in his sky now, save Polaris.

"Dra!-"

"-slighted!"

" _ **SECTUMSEMPRA!"**_

The tendrils of distorted reality at the tip of his wand only appeared, but for a moment, like a white star. The invisible sword that lopped his Aunt's left arm off at the elbow in a show of scarlet treachery was, however, impossible to miss.

Her wand fell from that height, clasped in the taloned grip that bore the Dark Mark that Draco had divested their master's lieutenant of.

Bellatrix reared back, unable to process the spigot of blood issuing from the ruined stump.

Narcissa gasped in horror, his father issued a growl, fruitlessly grasping at the empty walking stick at his side, which was bereft of the wand that his master had forbidden him from wielding.

Fenrir turned his wand on Draco with an equal mixture of surprise and hunger, lips twisting around a curse-

" _Confringo!"_

-just to be lost in a fiery gout of blood.

His warrior princess of Sparta, covered in the ichor of her tormentor, had taken the werewolf's life for him. Stained her spotless soul… for him.

She's as shocked as he is.

In the vacuum of a moment, his mother began to form words, which, really, might have been anything, when the heavy wood paneled french doors of the drawing room detonated behind her.

Harry Potter and his faithful sidekick have escaped captivity.

_Finally._

Potter's patented " _Expelliarmus!"_ snapped Narcissa's ebony wand from its mistress's hand, and his father could barely manage two spell deflections, using the shielding charms bound to the rune array under the veneered shaft of his father's walking stick, before he fell to a stunner from the Weasel.

What an ignominious climax to the only successful skirmish ever waged against Malfoy Manor.

The agonized wailing of his dismembered foe had arrested the attention of the Boy-who-apparently-wouldn't-curse-anyone-but-Draco for a moment. It is in the breath of this moment that the ginger affliction to his house is able to stupify his father, and that allows the boy, who might just have become a man, to walk over to Hermione and offer her his free hand. It's a calculated maneuver as much as a requested boon.

She surprises him by replying with both hands, grasping the proffered limb with one, and pulling him down to bended knee with the other.

And then she's wrapped them both around him, and is sobbing out her thanks against his collarbone and into his ear.

It's a balm that forgives his past transgressions, and praises his small act of valor. Four out of his five senses fail, and he responds by bracing her shivering form against him, conveying the inviolable nature of his decision in the only way that seemed to make sense.

She whimpered and Draco felt the sting of regret, but then she dug in even deeper, somehow making the embrace more intimate, and warmth shot upwards from the pit of his gut to the space between his shoulder blades.

This pride… this… this was everything. Years of backhanded compliments and mocking commendations from his father, then the Dark Lord, paled in comparison to the effects of a simple affirmation he had been offered by a witch, for an intercession she had never even asked of him.

She knew how he felt, how could she not after stepping through the corridors of his mind? He didn't hold the intrusion against her, after all, it was her's, all of it. This was his moment, his choice, he needed to talk to her, to gauge how she felt in the wake of what had to be a startling series of revelations, to inquire if she was experiencing any aftershocks from her torture, to just _look_ into the eyes that had held him captive for longer than he could-

"What. The. Fuck?"

Ah, there was his rival's fabled heroic timing.

* * *

**I took a break from a WIP I had started while locked in my house in order to focus on drafting some original fiction. But, when I recently showed my fiance the Harry Potter movies for the first time, I was once again reminded that Draco's story in Book 7 was a missed opportunity for one of the greatest redemption arcs in western literature. I've been planning this scene in my head for over thirteen years, and I've never seen it in another fic the way I wanted to. Dramione fans know that he has the makings of a great wizard inside of him; we hold Draco in higher regard than J.K. does. By her own admission, she's never been able to reconcile the character she wrote with the bully who served as his original inspiration.**

**When she later claimed that Astoria was the one who disabused him of his prejudices, and prevented him from raising Scorpius with them… I think even other shippers sputtered in disbelief. Why would a girl from the same social class as Malfoy have a stronger influence on him than the muggleborn prodigy he's been in school with for years? Even J.K. admits that the behavior of a young Draco very clearly parallels a boy who is too immature to express a crush on a peer in an appropriate way.**

**That's where this story came from, I just looked at the behavioral pattern of a boy progressing through puberty and navigating his privilege, as a lens to look at canon through.**

**If you like my Dramione you're more than welcome to check out my crossover WIP!**

**Also, all credit to Olivieblake for the inspired escapades of Armand Malfoy, she is truly one of the greatest recent novelists I've read in some time.**

**Oh, and leave a comment telling me what you thought of this writing style and plot divergence- are the ramifications something to be explored, this was meant to be a oneshot but... I could be convinced otherwise.**

* * *

Update: This is a full story now!


	2. Forever Unshackled

_Warm hands trace the pads of delicate, pianist fingers up the inside of her thighs in a covetous embrace. The warmth of his mouth locks at the juncture between her throat and shoulder, completely set in its task. Impossibly, she still hears the four, perfectly formed syllables that comprise her name fall from his lips like a prayer, “Hermione…”_

* * *

Hermione awoke with a shudder and a gasp. She’d researched the effects of prolonged exposure to the cruciatus curse after she’d first witnessed the man she thought to be her professor inflict it on a spider, in her fourth year at Hogwarts.

Assuming one dodged the possible psychological fallout, the victim could look forward to a litany of fun, physiological aftereffects. 

-phantom pains at the extremities were common, loss of fine motor control and balance were as well, and a hypersensitivity to any topological irritations to round it all out- 

Hermione should be dodging nightmares and scratching at the wound on her arm, like the plucky prisoner of war she’d have idealized; not grinding her aching center into the pillow she had stuck between her legs to offer some relief. 

Shame, propriety and her flagging self esteem warred against the sopping mass of petal soft flesh and damp curls that was busy staining the abraxan-down pillow of the Shell Cottage guest room she had been assigned to convalesce in.

Her arm had been bound in a cursebreaker’s frontline poultice then wrapped in gauze, like Bill had done it a hundred times. Fleur had drawn her a warm bath, lent her a night gown that was, for some reason both sheer and knee length, and they both had taken turns pouring enough potions down her throat to knock Grawp on his arse. Presumably, this precaution was probably taken to safeguard her against the horrors of her sleeping mind. She woke sometime in the first 24 hours of her treatment, inquired into the wellbeing of her entire party, ate, then promptly went back to sleep after refusing a second course of Dreamless Sleep Potion. She had been too exhausted and relieved to be frightened of the possibility of a night terror, but these visions were… not what she had anticipated as a possible consequence. 

Hermione didn’t have to question where they came from, she already knew. Her first foray into legilimency had been… ‘ _wow_.’ She had hypothesized, for years now, that the kindly understanding that students were always met with when fixed with Dumbledore’s twinkling gaze had been the result of the intrusive mental art but… how was he able to perform magic of that magnitude so fluidly? So subtly? She’d been wandless and half out of her mind with desperation when she cast it on Malfoy- was it always like that?

It was easy to rationalize the depths she had plumbed Draco Malfoy’s mind by fixating on the comparisons between herself and the late headmaster. Far easier than admitting it was because of _him_ that she had been drawn in so deep. 

_‘Hermione…’_

A collection of sounds that she had never, not once, heard the boy say out loud- but that she now had intimate knowledge of. 

She had been sent careening through 6 years worth of private ruminations while she stained the drawing room of his ancestral seat, and while much of these memories had been obfuscated by a haze of pain and token resistance, the underlying sentiments were quite apparent. Her unconscious mind had latched on to the highlight reel with the fervor of a woman parched for affection, and she spent the hours from twilight to now picking each recollection apart to examine at length.

_‘Hermione…’_

The rasp of his desire frayed across the bindings of a childhood’s worth of elocution lessons, and she was once again reminded that it had been _her_ eyes that had been the focal point of each recollection. Her eyes that had been the anchor of each formative experience. She sluiced over the pillow.

She needed to stop. She needed… water. 

She needed water. 

Hermione twisted in position and put her feet on the ground. She observed the end table, whose top was vacant, save for a lamp and an empty glass. Bringing herself to a standing position on shaking doe legs, she grabbed the fleece dressing gown that was laid at the foot of her bed and set off to the kitchen in a mockery of Fleur’s graceful gait. She was without a wand, and could only pray that the hour was late enough that the entirety of the household was abed, and would be saved from the sight of her doing her best impression of a little girl in her mother’s clothing.

The shell-in-whitewash hallway finally came to an end with a hardwood door that disguised the murmuring of voices, but not the light that spilled out from under the seam.

No such luck, then.

She turned the knob and was greeted with the sight of Harry and Ron, huddled over the kitchen table. Their conspiring ground to a halt as she came into view, and they launched from their seats to fold her into an embrace, only made awkward on her end by the treacherous stain she’d no doubt made in the translucent gown that she’d secured under a layer of Beauxbatons blue fleece. 

She’d meant to ask after their wellbeing, what came out was; “Where’s my wand?” 

Ron released her first and produced the 10 and 3/4s of pale vinewood from his denim pocket, before offering it gingerly to her. She all but ripped it from his hands. 

Harry was slower to move away, more possessive. She tried not to let that bother her, she really did. 

They moved to the table with the unspoken coordination of three friends who had been dragging overstuffed furniture into vague approximations of a triangle to lounge across for the better part of 6 years. 

“So, how are you...?” Harry let the question drop off as Hermione exercised her magic with a flurry of nonverbal spells.

 _‘Tempus,’_ a blue ribbon sprung from the tip of her wand, forming the numbers 2:12. _‘Flintifors,’_ the ribbon compressed and became a bundle of floating kindling. _‘Incendio,’_ the kindling combusted.

She didn’t need to cast a levitation charm to keep it suspended, she’d been able to levitate books from the shelf to her hands since she’d been 9, and her parents had brought her home a copy of Roald Dahl’s _Matilda_. She laid her wand down and simply fixed the fire with a glare. It kept spinning in place, 6 inches above the tabletop. 

Ron eyed the flame appreciatively, but Harry’s inquisitive gaze didn’t falter for a moment. Finally she answered as honestly as she was capable; “Better than I expected… How is Griphook?” Harry nodded, as if he expected the inquiry.

“Half a bottle of Skele-gro in, and on the mend… his ankle got caught in a door when Pettigrew came for him, that’s when we got him…” 

“That’s good… what about-” Ron’s voice broke in to reassure her, “Dean’s fine, Ollivander’ll be okay, Luna… well- you know how she is, I think she half enjoyed the dungeon- said that it was better than what was going on at Hogwarts- if you can believe it!” The response was not nearly as comforting as he intended it to be. If one was charitable to Luna’s perception of circumstances… what the devil was going on at Hogwarts?

“There has to be one there!” Harry’s voice followed Ron’s up, and she didn’t dismiss the notion as readily as she had done in the past.

“Maybe… but now we KNOW there’s one in Gringotts- and we even know in what vault.”

Both boys nodded in response, and Ron muttered the answer underbreath, “Lestrange.”

“And then the snake.” Harry finished, as if it was that easy. Just because he wasn’t chosen to be tortured for- she cut the line of thinking there and schooled her features.

That wasn’t his fault, she’d been the one to disguise him, he didn’t deserve her ire- although casting that stinging jinx had felt _good_ . It felt good to punish him for breaking the taboo, for bruising her ego over Christmas… _stop it_ … Forget about it; so what if he didn’t think about her that way- Ron, Ron had screamed bloody murder for her when they had dragged him away, had offered himself in her place at the manor… the manor; “What about Malfoy?” 

Ron did his best impression of the youngest Death Eater’s sneer; “Pft, what about him?”

Harry was more diplomatic; “In the root cellar, we were waiting for you to wake up before we interrogated him… what happened up there, with him?” 

He looked like he had spent the last 2 days running theories by a disinterested Ron. It wasn’t as if she’d given him a satisfactory answer in the moment. She herself had only come to terms with the fruits of her legilimentic burrowing after a restless night spent reliving Malfoy’s most private thoughts…

They were both still looking at her, clearly expecting an answer. How was she to answer that? _‘Oh, well, you know how it is, apparently the bane of our school year existence has been nursing such an intense infatuation with me, that he decided to betray his very way of life on the off chance he could renanct his explicit sexual fantasies, all of which starring me.’_ Well, they’d obviously not believe that… Harry couldn’t even be bothered to see her as a sexual partner when she was in her underthings, kissing him, imploring him that it would just be for one night- one Christmas indulgence between a man and a woman who, after all, had been friends forever- who had always respected and comforted each other. 

She could remember slow dancing together at their lowest point, with one wand and no Weasley for a New Years Eve kiss between the two of them. She’d started it, but she’d always been the more... mature one between the two. Hermione was a witch, and she knew the potential dangers she’d be more likely to face as one… she couldn’t fathom the horrors of sexual assault, but the idea that rape could possibly be her first experience _ever_ was actively distressing.

So she started it. Let one hand drift down the broad plain of his chest, turned her chin inward to tickle his throat. The books told her men were supposed to be _easy_ when confronted with a girl who was warm and willing! They’d been snogging in the kitchen, and managed to make it all the way to her cot without him opening his eyes once. Or disengaging at the tongue. Oh, that had finally changed when he’d stripped her down, and she returned the favor, just as hungrilly but… as soon as his eyes had wandered down from her face to her plain black, cotton bra her best friend had stopped in his tracks. 

_‘It was the locket.’_ And maybe it was. Harry swore up and down that it was as he sprung off her, as if burned- tripping over the denim leg that she hadn’t yet helped him remove from his ankle. 

_‘It’s the locket, this… this isn’t real. We don’t really want this. I couldn’t do that to Ginny, hell- to Ron even!’_ As if it **had** to be the locket. As if he’d never be attracted to her for any other reason. As if, when confronted with Hermione, flat on her back and begging you to be her first, the rational object to latch on to, for a young man, was the locket- _instead of the fucking tits it was nestled between_. 

How was she to convince that man that the boy that used to call her a mudblood was obsessed with her? It had to be obsession, it couldn’t be love. Ron loved her. Ron who-was still staring at her, as she had yet to supply them with an answer. Ah, yes- time to lie.

“I think it was… a bit of a come to Jesus moment, you know? It was the knife that broke him… she was in the middle of carving the word mudblood onto my arm and… I just don’t think he could stand it anymore- knowing that he was the first person to call me that- and that his flesh and blood was actually going to make sure I’d never forget it.”

Ron’s eyebrows had climbed steadily higher as she wheedled out the lie, leaving the cornflower blue eyes she really did adore, adrift on his pale visage. The disbelief was palpable, but Harry interjected before his best friend could unload his scorn. 

“That makes sense, I figured it was a heat of the moment thing… We knew he was unable to kill Dumbledore when it came down to it- this was probably just more of the same.”  
Ron was undeterred; “Just because he doesn’t have the stones for bloodshed doesn’t mean that he’s suddenly against You-know-who! Think about how he’s treated us our entire lives?” Ron packed the indignation of a shout into a whisper, and Hermione was struck by the realization that they had forgone a _muffliato_ , as good an attestation as any for the fact that this was entirely too late to be having a rational discussion. 

Apparently, Harry agreed. He flicked his gaze meaningfully from Ron to Hermione, before shrugging, finding his footing, and claiming that he wanted to use the loo for his nightly ablutions, before bed. 

She recognized what this was immediately. Harry was giving Ron the privacy to confess, _finally_ , his feelings. How worried he’d been for her- how he’d offered himself up because he couldn’t bear the thought of any harm coming to her. She’d always had a soft spot for Ron; tall, handsome, loyal Ron-with those expressive eyes. Harry had pretty eyes too, but he was always so quick to avert them, as if there was never anything interesting to see in her general direction… But Ron…barely waited for the door to close behind Harry before he turned back to her.

“I think he’s going a bit mad, you know- with the strain of everything.” Hermione was inclined to agree, and did so- letting him state his piece. Clearly emboldened, he continued; “When… when everything was going on, at the Malfoy’s,” (this he spit with rare venom,) “you know… I was pretty gutted by it, ‘Mione.” 

She always did hate that nickname, but she clamped down on the irritation, and extended her hand to rest gently on the arm between them. He was doing well tonight- adjusted for his normal, teaspoon deep, emotional range. She fixed him with as saccharin a smile that she could twist her features into, positively simpering, really… “You know you’re ugh- you’re really special to me, ‘Mione. You know that, right?”

Good, this was good! “Of course I know that, I- Ron- I missed you constantly when you were gone, you can’t even imagine.” Common Ron, take the hint. Be a Gryffindor, tell me you felt the same...

“Ah, well- I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as all that, bet Harry kept you in good spirits.” No, you idiot, he actually didn’t. He made me feel less wanted than your sister, who goes through wizards like she’s making her way through a sugar quill variety pack and you, who dropped us because you were feeling jealous and left out- because you’ve never had the discipline to stay with a particularly rigorous piece of homework, let alone an epic quest that could have been ripped from the pages of high fantasy. Like Tolkien, if there were 7 rings of power and Sauron had never bothered to disclose the location of Mount Doom…

And the Fellowship was useless.

And Gandalf had never returned. 

Her displeasure was clearly being made visible in the lull of the conversation, so she tossed the boy a lifeline.

“He didn’t, he really didn’t- it wasn’t the same without you.” He smiled at that, like a puppy whose owner had walked through the door with a treat. Her flagging libido groused against her idyllic heart, which was waiting with bated breath for his response. It felt like the revolving fire had chewed through all of the air in the room.

“Well, I should say so, he doesn’t… no one appreciates you like I do, Hermione. You're… you’re very special.” The repetition of the word was like a slap in the face. She let go of his arm.

* * *

_She’s seven again. Parent Teacher Conference. Hermione doesn’t fit in with the other children. “Your daughter is a very special girl, Doctors Granger…”_

* * *

It took her a moment, but she found enough breath for a response:“...Special?”

“Yea, you know… different, umm, not like most girls- you know?” 

* * *

_She’s twelve again. The courtyard beneath the window of Charms. Hermione still doesn’t fit in with her peers. “She’s a nightmare, honestly, it’s no wonder she hasn’t got any friends!”_

* * *

Her displeasure had to be palpable now. She’d been waiting an entire year, from the very moment Ron had unknowingly shattered Lavender Brown’s heart in the Hospital wing, for this? ‘Special… not like other girls?’ What did that even mean? 

“Why? I mean, what about me is different?” She didn’t even try to hide the mounting frustration, and with a last attempt to guide him to the finish line, ruled out some of the answers she wouldn’t accept; the ones he’d be most tempted to fall back on, “There are Gryffindors more brave, Ravenclaws as clever, Hufflepuffs more loyal, Slytherin’s more resourceful- what about me is different?” 

He snorted. “I’m not so sure there’s anyone as smart as you, ‘Mione!” 

Wrong. Answer. 

Smart wasn’t the same thing as clever. Didn’t he know that admiring how her mind worked was completely different from appreciating her ability to retain information? She thought her intellect was one of her more attractive, or at least, beguiling features. 

“Merlin, I’m more than just an encyclopedia on legs, Ron!” 

His face betrayed his confusion.

“Of course you are, you’re also the most loyal… I mean- even after I left, I know I didn’t say anything but... Harry told me…”

* * *

_She’s fifteen again. The Yule ball. Hermione cannot even change enough to be accepted. “You’re consorting with the enemy!”_

* * *

**Harry told him…** **_what_ **? In a better frame of mind, Hermione might not have jumped to the conclusions that she did. She was not, however, having the best of weeks. She erupted.

“Harry told you, what? That I was waiting for you? That I cried every night without you? That- that no one would comfort me without you? Because, because why? Because I’m not worth sticking around for, but simultaneously not as good as someone who isn’t even there? Because I don’t have any options besides you? That I can just be, left alone, with nothing- not any encouragement, except the occasional smile, and nobody but that IDIOT, McLaggen, will look at me at think- oh, there’s a decent looking girl with a good head on her shoulders, maybe I could figure out what her interests are, see if we have something in common? Well you’re wrong, Ronald Billius Weasley, you’re wrong!”

While Hermione’s questionably motivated tirade was slightly out of character, Ron’s ensuing splotchy sputtering, was not. 

“But, I thought, Harry said…”

Hermione grasped at her wand with a sweep, and the floating ball of flame roared with renewed passion, gorging itself on the depths of her fury as much as its dwindling wood supply. It began to die, and with a dismissive flick of her dragon heartstring, it transformed into the bluebell flame she had been famous for as an underclassmen. 

The Azure pallor did nothing to cool the mood.

She didn’t bother to correct his assumption- she didn’t even give him the courtesy of formally ending their conversation. She left the glass walls of the kitchen without addressing him, into the brisk night air. 

Everything that could have been said between them, was said. Ronald had been jealous of her friendship with Harry, and only wanted her because he thought she was the one thing he could have that Harry couldn’t. And Harry had fed right into that by promising him that nothing had happened between them in the months he’d been away. That Hermione was so undesirable that if you smiled at her enough, and get jealous over her constantly, and tell her she’s “special...” 

She’d, what? Wait for you? Past all reason? After being left on a warfront, alone? Because… because she was so desperately in love with him, and could never do any better? 

Clearly, after distance killed any chance of a relationship with Victor, and arrogance ended Cormac’s bid before it ever truly began, _clearly_ , a combination of these things were exactly what would get Ron into her good graces. 

And her good graces had to be his target, because he too had done _nothing_ when she initiated physical contact, so her knickers _could not_ have been his end goal.

She didn’t care that Ron was most likely, at this very moment, shaking Harry awake to address a lie he thought he had caught his best friend in. 

She wanted… to be wanted, god damn it! To be someone's first choice! 

Her feet knew her destination before her conscious mind had caught up. 

Because she knew of someone that didn’t think of her like a silver medal. That fueled his affections on even less than the occasional smile. Who had thought that the men who pursued her were unworthy of her affections. That she could do better than them, better even, than himself. One who mentally drafted and redrafted entire compositions about how “special” he found her. As if such a pedestrian, such an uninspired, word would ever pass from between his lips. 

Draco Malfoy had spent the 7 years of their acquaintanceship examining what color best described her, very plain, eyes. They weren’t even amber or firewhiskey colored, like Ginny’s! They were just… she had always thought that… they were just brown.

Snape had told Harry that legilimency wasn’t like reading a book, and Hermione understands now. A legilimens perceived events and notions through the eyes of the beholder. She had seen and had heard how he had been unable to settle on an apt description for her gaze. 

_Simmering, molten, cocoa, hot, earthy_ … This breach let the memories in, the ones that had woken her in the first place. She breathed in, held it, and then breathed out- before she was reduced to rubbing her thighs together in frustration. 

She stared down the locked doors of the root cellar, surprisingly secured only with an oversized muggle padlock that looked freshly conjured. 

_‘Alohomora.’_

The lock fell to the dirt, made impotent with a dismissive flick of her wand. 

She hesitated for only a moment, and questioned what she was doing, what she planned to do. Then she flicked her wand again, and both doors sprung open.

And she descended into the abyss. 

* * *

The metallic clink of his prison coming undone brought Draco immediately to alert.

 _Finally_. 

Draco knew he would be met with distrust here but… he hadn’t expected to be locked in a cellar for a full day before he’d face interrogation. 

The fallout from his betrayal at the manor had been immediate. The temporary cessation of hostilities between the Golden Trio and himself had served him well. With Granger as his advocate, Potter and Weasley had been distracted enough for Draco to launch into the finest contingency plan that he’d ever thought of on his feet. He’d had fantasies, of course, that had been percolating in the corners of his mind that were still unafraid to dream… 

But dammit if it hadn’t felt good to finally take control over the situation. 

Delicate unshod feet came into view first, a tantalizing stretch of pale calf next, then an entirely too modest dressing gown, before, finally, _her_.

The sight of his witch was more refreshing than the briney, coastal air she let in behind her.

“Granger.”

Her eyes found him in the dimly lit cellar, and her moonlit features morphed from apprehension to indignation with startling rapidity. Was she angry with him? 

“Malfoy, who chained you to the wall?”

No, she was angry on his behalf! 

“Who!?”

“Don’t be too cross with Weasley-the-elder, he’s been feeding me regularly.”

“That’s not the point,” she screamed, still irate.

He chuckled; “Shhhhh, as touching as this is, Granger, you don’t need to wake the entire house up quite yet.” 

The witch huffed, then walked over to where he was seated and joined him on the dirt floor. She grabbed at the shackles that fettered him to the ring set in the wall, before tracing the runes that were engraved into the otherwise unburnished bands.

“Hieroglyphics,” in a voice so low, he wouldn’t have heard it if she wasn’t close enough to touch. 

“Yes, the bindings of _Khnrt Wer_ , they restrict-”

“-Summoning magic! Well that makes sense, Bill cut his teeth as a cursebreaker in Egypt…” She trailed off and looked at him as she realized why Bill had chosen that specific rune set. His little creature crusader.

“Yes, I’m sure he chose to employ them after witnessing my, rather liberal, usage of house elves to aid our escape.” She found his eyes again, and he could see her ethical principles were warring with her gratitude for her deliverance.

“I don’t approve of slavery.” She started, with all the practice of a pro-bono lobbyist accustomed to being turned down. Tired, but convinced of the worthiness of her cause.

“It’s hardly slavery.” He countered, goading her with an expected refrain. She didn’t disappoint. 

“It… It’s the bondage of a sentient creature without compensation, who is yours to use and abuse! What could it be, but slavery?” She answered, as her dark hair seemed to inflate by the second, now resembling the frizz of her youth more than the curls of her adolescence. Parry, riposte.

“I’d liken it more to serfdom than slavery.” She stopped in her intellectual tracks like she’d been slapped. He continued on, shoring up the gap in her logic. 

“It’s not as if house elves were conquered and enslaved, wizardkind created them to be our servants, to be custodians of the natural magic we lost touch with when we adopted wands, under the Roman Empire. That is why they’re bound to magical estates as caretakers.” Draco finished the point with a respectful nod, inviting further dialogue. He was not disappointed. 

“The transitive property of their ownership indicates to the contrary! They swear no oaths of fealty to the family they serve, they’re simply born into their station, and socialized by their families to enjoy bondage.” She finished the last point with a rhetorical flourish, her pink tongue darting out to moisten her bottom lip in the wake of her modulated disdain. It was an expected rejoinder, one that Draco had years to develop a counter argument for. 

“A fair point, but servitude is the cornerstone of their entire culture: their passion, their very way of life. If man and wizard were both created by a deity to worship and obey, so too is the house elf to us.” Hermione blinked, as if he had responded by shoving a _lumos_ in front of her face, rather than a good point.

“You believe in God?” 

“I believe in a prime mover, who set the cosmos in divine order. Don’t you?” She looked at him like she’d never seen him before, then she looked away, as if that _lumos_ had suddenly become blinding.

“No, I… I suppose I haven’t attended an organized religious service since before I received my letter… from Hogwarts.” She still refused to meet his gaze, so he endeavored to soften his response.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t believe, that you don’t pray..” 

She sighed before intoning a practiced response; “There are no atheists in foxholes, I suppose.” 

“That sounds like a quote.”

She finally looked at him again, and he observed an inexplicable glimmer of pain in her eyes, like a tear that she refused to let fall. “It’s a muggle aphorism… ummm, an aphorism is-”

“I know what an aphorism is, Granger.” She nodded as that was something she should have known to expect.

“I still don’t agree with you about House Elves, the right of self determination is intrinsic to all beings with the ability to think and reason;” as if daring him to argue the point.

But the newly ascended Lord of the Malfoy family didn’t wish to, for he had manueverd her precisely where he meant to.

“On that note, I couldn’t agree further. It is not as if the entire practice is beyond reproach; abusing one’s servant is the disgusting, albeit telling, display of a wizard who lacks control and security in all aspects of his life.” The ghost of a smile turned up the corner of her lip at his insinuation, and he felt emboldened to continue. “And, of course, I don’t think that the service should continue down the family line, without the need to voluntarily reswear to the house; A wizard or elf may be in possession of divinely imparted urges and affections, but it is ultimately his choice on whether he… tethers himself to them, or not.”

The topic shift was more overt than he had planned out in his head, but his vivacious conversational partner seemed to take it in stride. 

“Ah, yes… I suppose we have been avoiding the Hippogriff in the cellar.” She tried to match the confidence of his transition with a smirk, but she looked distinctly uncomfortable, as if she’d been balanced precariously on a Granian colt who had accelerated to a speed she did not yet trust him with.

The lordling opened his mouth to put her out of her misery, when she charged ahead again, heedless of her own discomfort; “That’s what I saw in your mind then, a “divinely imparted affection?””

Draco breathed in while she finished, looked slightly to her left, so as to cobble together a response that would dignify her Gryffindorish inquiry. Ultimately, he let his field of view be dragged back to her with a sigh, a shrug of his shoulders and a pair of upturned palms.

“What else could it be?” Her eyes narrowed and her cupid's bow curled with perceived hurt, but his hands snaked out to grasp her’s at the wrists. “How else can I explain how I was able to overcome so much? My upbringing, my fears- the distance between our stations and our lives? I was raised in this magical world, Hermione, but attending boarding school with you, year after year, is like a constant exercise in walking into the Great Hall for the first time, having skipped the chapter on it in “Hogwarts: A History.” You know what you’re observing is, well, it’s bewitched, of course, but it’s bewitching _you_ , and you can’t quite take your eyes off it, and you can’t quite touch it, because it’s not real- but it’s better than real- it’s the very image of the heavens, brought in close, just for you. It’s an entire world that’s beautiful, but still out of reach, and it’s- you’re overthrowing, do you know that, Hermione? Has anybody ever taken the time to tell you just how maddening, how _enthralling_ it is to just watch you bouncing prettily in your seat in Charms, with the last light of a highlands afternoon falling through your hair?”

From the first mention of her given name, Draco could feel the thumping of Hermione’s radial arteries as the heat washed across her, painting her entire visage scarlett with the flush of embarrassment. He’d never seen a woman so red, from the roots of her hair to the hint of her collarbone-and getting redder as the silence went on, breached only by the conspicuously short breaths that issued like puffs from the O of her lips, which were now completely chapped.

Then, finally-

“Malfoy.”

“Draco, please.” 

Her eyes shot down to where the instructions had come from. Her irises had almost completely disappeared from view, and her pupils seemed to be blown wide by the request. Oh, that was _interesting_. Her tongue swiped out against ballet slipper pink lips once more. Then twice. 

“Dray-coh.” The alternation of consonants and vowels sounded alien in her mouth. Another cock hardening swipe of her tongue. He’s never seen it for this great a stretch of time, at least not without it being colored blue by her favorite flavor of sugar quill. His manhood hardened further, pressing frustratingly up and against the placket of his trousers with an urgency that rips a painful growl from him. 

The twin vats of boiling pitch, formerly known as Hermione Granger’s eyes, drifted further downward, where she could see his hips moving to alleviate the strain of his constriction.

Her tongue passes her lips, not in a dart, but with a single, all consuming swipe that finally moistens her enough to try again. 

“Draco, you... you can’t be serious.”

Draco is as serious as thestral sighting, furthermore, he’s decided that her tongue is the color of an Afghan poppy. He wonders what she’d taste like. Oh, right- he’s meant to be witty here.

“Why, of course I can- I’ll have you know, exoticism is a perfectly traditional sexual fixation for any British gentleman of good breeding.”

There was a quick intake of breath before her response; “I am not a fetish.”

“In what manner could I possibly have conveyed that I viewed you as a perversion?”

“That’s not what… forget that. Do you know the years I’ve spent, the hours I’ve sunk, trying to prove that I belong in this world to purebloods? To people like you? That it’s been your sneering face that I see in my mind behind every Death Eater mask?” 

He swallowed hard, but knew that if he broke eye contact now, she’d never think him honest. It was a lesson imparted by his father’s grooming, and it had served him well in the past. “Would you like it? My mask, that is… would you like it?”

“Why would I want such a thing?” The muggleborn witch didn’t sound mistrustful, not quite. 

“Because then you can destroy it, and you’d be assured that I have no intention of ever fighting for their cause again.” 

She leaped on the point like a lioness, but she hissed like a snake; “If what you say is true, then why did you join in the first place?” He wasn’t deterred. 

“You know the answer to that question. I didn’t have a choice in the matter, not a real one, anyway; except to rationalize my decision using my anger over the incarceration of my father.”

She gently pried his fingers from her wrists and found her footing. Draco’s heart plummeted from his chest to his gut at the loss of contact, and he closed his eyes. _‘So it is too late to make amends…’_

“So what happens now? Are the Weasley’s to take care of you as a deserter forever? We can’t just let you leave, you know that, don’t you?” The questions burned him. The silly witch thought he wanted to be parted from her?

“Then let me go with you.” She gasped instead of responding, so he continued on. “I can be of use to your party; I have an intimate knowledge of Death Eater tactics, and am quite handy in a duel.”

“That’s… that’s quite impossible. Harry and Ron would never allow it.” 

“Why not?” Draco managed to say in a tone of voice that was not _quite_ a growl. 

“Because they don’t trust you, and the utility of your addition to our party is dubious, at best.” He scoffed, ‘ _steady on_.’ 

“You know I’d never betray you, and that I’m the fastest quick draw you know.” That repartee earned him a giggle.

“You know, men don’t often brag about something like that,” she managed to snicker out. Was she really trying to change the serious nature of their conversation so conspicuously? 

“Hermione, I’ve outdrawn both Bellatrix Lestrange and Albus Dumbledore in my time. Although, if you truly want a demonstration of my proficiency with my _other_ wand, you’re more than welcome to come back down here and take these shackles off.”

She rolled her eyes, and Draco knew the moment was gone. He chose the power of silence, and coupled it with an incredulous countenance, as if to say ‘ _Well_?,’ with his entire person, instead of just with his words. 

“Don’t look at me like that, what am I to tell them?” He didn’t like the lack of surety that underlied the question, although he understood the necessity of it; Potty and Weasel were just as much an obstacle now as they had ever been. The Slytherin inside of him plotted out a conversational path in front of him with a spark of prescience. 

“How about the truth?” Her amused disbelief had returned, and she seemed to struggle to find a response, before finally cobbling together a; “They’d never believe it.” He killed the glee inside of him, then doubled down before she could voice her own doubts.

“Just because they are too oblivious to realize the treasure they’ve been in an advantageous position to pursue for years now, does not mean that every wizard would, if given the opportunity, Hermione.” He knew, had always known, what her name from his mouth would do to her. Sure enough, she found herself unable to look down at him again. 

“Well that’s… rather besides the point. It’s more than just that- the three of us have been tasked with a very serious series of objectives. No one else in the Order, save the person who tasked us, knows of them. They wouldn’t agree to _anyone_ joining us, least of all you.”

He was undettered,“What if I could guarantee my utility to your mission and my dedication to your cause, all at once-while also sidestepping their crippling inability to see you as a witch?”

The appraising look she gave him was curious, if not downright intrigued. 

“How would you, hypothetically of course, accomplish this?” 

He answered with an earnest smile to disguise the fact that he had thought up the solution to her anticipated distrust at least half an hour ago. 

“Let me prove to you the dignity and pleasure of service to a good master, when the dawn breaks and the eldest Weasley wakes, let me swear to you an unbreakable vow.”

Draco doesn’t have to have her in his arms to know that his little rhyme has stolen her breath away. 

There’d be time enough for that later, and his wrists felt lighter already.

* * *

**Well, what do we think?**   
**I've sketched out a plot for the story, and outlined the chapters, but how do we feel about the characterizations? For the record, I'm not unconvinced that something of the nature close to the almost Harry/Hermione thing didn't happen in the sub-canon of Rowling's mind. Hermione's very prideful self forgives Ron awfully quickly in canon, which is easily excused by the realities of young people in war. It is also why the long term viability of Ron/Hermione is so low, creating the completely believable problems we see in The Cursed Child. (The only plausible part of that god-forsaken composition.)**


	3. Forever Bound

The familiar screaming woke Harry from the vision. The Boy-who-lived had spent the last 36 hours either awake, dealing with Ron's outrage, or asleep, and dealing with Voldemort's.

He had barely slept the first night at the cottage, and when he did, he witnessed the fallout of Malfoy's deception. The youngest Death Eater had moved like a man possessed when Harry and Ron had stumbled into the drawing room. In the space of a handful of minutes, Malfoy had stunned his mother, looted his father's walking stick and signet ring, and proceeded to take total control of the manor from his former master. Harry hadn't been able to keep up with all of the instructions that had been issued to the house elf staff, but in short order the Malfoy parents had been apparated to an undisclosed location, and their son had been digging through a satchel and stirring away at a simmering cauldron that had been brought to the middle of the room.

Harry had debated the merits of hexing him in the interim but reigned the urge in, chiefly because of the imploring look on Hermione's face. She had been in rough shape when he and Ron had blown their way in, but she had been clinging to Malfoy like a lifeline from that point on. When Malfoy had explained that the potion he was purposefully mangling would result in a "particularly impressive explosion" that would engulf the drawing room and most of the adjacent chambers, she didn't seem surprised in the slightest.

A nod of affirmation and a swift "Do what he saids, Harry," from Hermione had made them comply. By the time Malfoy had finished tinkering with the cauldron by dropping a sprig of something dead looking, he wasted not a breath before grasping the grisly appendage that formerly belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange and pressing a thumb to her Dark Mark. The attending house elves had grasped at Harry and Ron's side and pulled them into an apparition that deposited the two friends on a gravel road in front of a wrought iron gate. Malfoy, Hermione and another elf had appeared after a heartbeat, before Ron even had a moment to scream, then they all felt the shockwave.

It came from some point beyond the wrought iron fence, and both Harry and Ron had starred, gobsmacked at the plume of blue smoke that seemed to rise out of sight, beyond a treeline.

Then Harry's scar had exploded in agony, and Ron was apparating them in sets to Shell Cottage.

Watching Voldemort's pale feet stalk the smoking crater that had blown out a wing's worth of roofing and facade was almost amusing enough to justify the splitting headache of the vision. The rage, the sheer mounting wrath of a boy who had never learned to take no for an answer, had reverberated up and down Harry's nervous system like a cruciatus as he played voyeur to his foe's growing understanding of the ruin. Tom Riddle had lost his two most devoted lieutenants- his left and right hands- as well as his werewolf pack figurehead, and, presumably, another chance to kill the Boy-who-lived. Harry wondered if Tom could sense his mirth.

And, Merlin, it hurt to laugh, but as he came to on a sofa in Shell Cottage, Harry still chuckled. The kitchen on the other side of the hearth had been turned into a makeshift triage by Fleur Weasley, and she had turned her full attention to Hermione.

He put off the interrogation of Griphook and Ollivander until Hermione woke, but the events at the manor had more than piqued his investigative instincts. He kept Ron awake that night with an incessant barrage of speculation, which had all been almost uniformly ignored. What had caused Draco Malfoy's dramatic desertion of Voldemort's ranks? He hadn't just ran away- he had fought and killed. He had blown Greyback's head clean off and left Bellatrix to bleed out on the floor. How had the last year changed the boy who wasn't even able to painlessly kill a man he absolutely loathed?

When the next day had come and gone with the restless lethargy of a hospital ward, Hermione had finally woken up. But when Harry had taken the hint to make himself scarce, the last thing he had expected was to be violently awoken by Ron, who was stuttering with betrayed indignation. After Harry had begged the space to turn the lights on and explain, he proceeded to spend the next hour expanding on the insinuations that Hermione had made. After the entire embarrassing, if albeit slightly edited, truth had been dragged from Harry's memories and Ron was no longer puce, he reiterated the same refrain he had given at the frozen lake; "So you see, we really don't see each other that way, nothing really happened- even alone and under the influence of the locket and cheap New Year's intoxicants. We kissed, once- **then decided that it wasn't what we wanted**. Ron, mate, I **love** your sister… and Hermione and I do love each other… but not like that."

That had been what finally doused the mutinous look on Ron Weasley's face. And that was true enough. It was the thought of Ginny's hurt expression that had stopped him in his tracks on New Years. Merlin knows, it wasn't Hermione. Besides the odd, occasional dream, he had never really considered his female best friend to be a suitable target for his adolescent urges. But he had been so lonely and so low that night. Without his holly wand, he had felt impotent. Harry hadn't felt so powerless since before learning he was a wizard. The feeling brought him back to his childhood, back to the cupboard under the stairs. Before the warmth of wand magic and hugs.

So he had been tempted by his soft, petite friend as she ran her hand down his pectoral, _(like Ginny,)_ and puffed breathes across his neck, _(like Cho.)_ It had been so cold on watch that night and she had been so warm as he screwed his eyes shut and let her take what she wanted from his mouth. When he opened his eyes and found her underneath him, wanting, all he could see was the gaudy locket that sat between the winter paled curves of her black clad breasts. It weighed down on the raggedy breaths of her cleavage, heavy like sin. Her curls became frizzy instead of sexy. Her eyes became boring instead of alluring. She was his sister, not just a willing witch. And this was farther than he had ever gotten with one before, even with Ginny.

He blamed the locket, and wrote off the hurt look on her face by the fact that she was still wearing the blasted thing. He didn't volunteer to take it though, didn't trust himself to.

It was better to keep the lion share of these details from his jealous friend though, so he just reiterated his main point to Ron again, trusting on the associated residual guilt to put an end to the inquiry; "That damned locket… you remember what it was like."

But the neutral expression on Ron's face didn't last long before it dissolved and was replaced with a bewildered furrowing of his brows. "So what went wrong tonight?"

Harry shrugged, but sleep was an unlikely fate for the foreseeable future, so he prompted his best friend to recount the path of the conversation.

Then regretted it, immensely. If he had it right, Hermione had been offended by the thought that Ron… trusted her to be faithful to the inevitable trajectory they had been both tiptoeing around for years? Actually, the more Harry tried to make sense of it, the more it seemed absolutely barmy.

"So you told her that you cared about her, complimented her, and then… that you appreciated her being loyal to you?"

Ron was reclined completely, and merely hummed out an affirmation as he dug the heels of his palms' into his eyes.

Harry was terrified- scared, absolutely stiff. What if he had completely misjudged the situation, and their discretion over New Years had meant more to Hermione than he had previously believed?

"Witches… I mean, who really understands them?" Harry offered, weakly.

Another grumbled agreement reached his ears. He let the matter rest, and laid back down to his bed. He considered, briefly, the thought of begging the higher powers of the ether that had taken such a special interest in his life that he'd sleep a full night without another vision. Then he decided that would be a waste of whatever credit he had accrued with them.

Tom made sure he was not disappointed, and the vision he was privy to as the sun rose the next day sent a chill through him.

When Ron's incoherent screaming woke him up from fitfully rolling around, Harry didn't even let the kitchen door fully open before he yelled back into the room, "He's got it, he's got the wand!"

Ron, poor Ron, who already looked ready to swing, soured even further. Harry took full stock of the inhabitants of the glass roofed, open floor plan of the cottage's kitchen.

There was Ron, at the table corner, Bill by his wife, near the sink, Dean and Luna sitting at the table, having a small breakfast… and Hermione and Draco Malfoy on a loveseat by the hearth.

Sharing a pot of tea. Looking thoroughly interrupted. It was almost domestic, actually.

Harry blinked once. Then twice. Then quietly asked if Ron and Hermione fancied a walk on the beach.

* * *

The morning sun was breathtaking on Hermione's skin as she walked barefoot along the surf. Every exhale discharged tension from her core, and every inhale made her heady with anticipation, like she had been the night before.

Ron could finally bear the silence no longer.

"What possessed you to let him out of the cellar?" Inhale. Exhale. ' _You have a response for this.'_

"I didn't sit right with me to leave him chained in the Weasley dungeon after he freed us from the Malfoy one." Harry nodded as if he expected the response, but Ron was incensed; "Dobby freed us from the Malfoy Dungeons, we didn't need his help!"

Hermione felt the wet sand pull between her toes, in time with her inhale. So Dobby had helped free them, of course. Heroic elf, she really needed to consult with him on the factors that led for his break with house elf tradition to see if they could be replicated… Water lapped at her ankles as a wave broke. Exhale.

"Be that as it may, he rescued me, personally. At great risk to himself." Inhale. Exhale. "Furthermore-" Harry's voice broke in here.

"-Look, it really doesn't matter about Malfoy… he's made sure that his family is out of it, completely. Tom thinks they're all dead. He can go join them and… we need to move on."

Hermione knew this next moment was pivotal. She found the idea of being separated from Malfoy now to be… abhorrent. Her next exhale passed through pursed lips like a propane gas leak, ready to ignite.

"Draco Malfoy is not our enemy, he has as much a reason to be in this fight as we do!"

At this, Harry was surprised enough to turn and look at her questioningly. Ron was beyond such a measured response, and simply worked his jaw open and shut in a pantomime of disbelief.

"What did he say to convince you of that?"

She swallowed. Harry was one of the few people that could tell when she was lying. The muggleborn prodigy had to _believe_ the words that she was about to utter. She found that she did. Inhale, exhale.

"These last two years have been horrid for him. He lived with the Dark Lord in his home for two years… Surely you must know what that's like?" She questioned Harry, but quickly moved on before he could do more than nod. "It was completely different than what he thought it was going to be like… completely different! Oh, sure, he was a prejudiced git growing up, and talked the talk- but when he actually saw it all happen in front of him, saw muggles and muggleborns being abused in his house, by the Dark Lord and his followers- it made him sick, Harry! But by then it was too late… he had taken the mark right after his father was arrested! Then Tom started to threaten his mother… What would you have done, if it was Lily," she snapped her gaze to Ron and ignored the hiss from Harry, "or Molly, instead of Narcissa?" Ron looked like he was about to be sick at her feet at the prospect. ' _Good.'_ She drove the point home.

"Who wouldn't you kill if the Dark Lord had an army of murderous rapists living in the same house as your mother? What wouldn't you do?"

At this, Ron actually doubled over with both hands on his knees and began to take deep breaths. Harry tipped his head back and did the same, then met her eyes again and said; "It's clear you spent the morning talking to him and already have a point to make in this conversation, so get on with it- we don't have the time for you to roll out the full ten step presentation."

Trust Harry to cut to the heart of the matter. Ron straightened up and looked at her, more curious than suspicious. He was a trusting boy, he barely had two ounces of guile to rub together when it came to her and Harry. It was an admirable trait, but one that inexplicably irked her. Inhale. She looked out onto the water and drank in the sun. If she made an effort, it was a clear enough day in Cornwall that she could lay out and toast her skin the nice tawny she had only achieved once before, after a summer trip to the French Riviera with her family. Exhale. She looked back at her best friends and began.

"We should bring Malfoy with us." At this, her friend's dispositions were completely exchanged. Ron nodded grimly, as if he had predicted that was the logical, if distasteful end of this interaction, but Harry was shocked into silence. She decided to strike while the iron was hot, and laid out the core tenants of her argument in a conducive an order as she could conceive:

"He offered his service to us, personally. He said he'd swear to me an unbreakable vow, and we've spent the morning ironing the wording out… and I think we should take him up on his offer. He's a more than fair duelist... He has a Dark Mark, so he can breach the barrier magic the Death Eaters used in Hogwarts, if we need to do that again… He's also just generally familiar with the way they fight, and their organizational structure, which is bound to be useful."

Ron was, amazingly enough, visibly rolling around the possibilities in his head. The effect was familiar as he fed the different factors she had outlined into the portion of his brain specifically reserved for his chess and quidditch victory algorithms. Harry was aghast, and determined to disagree.

"That's… that's not the point- Dumbledore wanted us to do this together, just the three of us." She had anticipated this response, had banked on it in the past, even.

"Yes but, Harry, Dumbledore always wanted Draco to come over… He never lost faith in his capacity for good. It's as you said, when he had Professor Dumbledore at wand point at the top of the Astronomy Tower, Dumbledore didn't plead for his life… he pleaded for Draco's soul. He knew what Draco had been doing the entire year!...But he also knew that Draco had little choice in the matter. Do you really think that, if given the opportunity to witness his student try to make amends, Dumbledore would tell you to turn him away?"

Harry looked at her like like she was defiling the pure marble of the late headmaster's grave, and Hermione braced for the expected, angry lash out. Then Ron interjected; "You know, it's always bothered me, about the poison… After what you told us about the tower, mate, Dumbledore knew that Malfoy was dangerous, even if he didn't believe it at first. But after cursing Katie as bad as he did, he just… let him stay there… and then I was poisoned, and still, nothing. I think… look, I don't forgive the blighter, but I… I get it, okay. I understand why the ferrety shit made the decisions that he did… But why, by Merlin's soggy Y-fronts, **WHY** did Dumbledore leave him alone after Katie, long enough to try again with poison and the cabinet?" Ron's anger had grown throughout the entire diatribe, regardless of the sacrilegious look that Harry had shifted over from Hermione to him.

"That… that has nothing to do with-" Hermione took a page from Harry's book and interrupted him.

"- but it does! It does, Harry! Dumbledore didn't intercede when Draco put other students in jeopardy because he trusted that there was good inside him. That he wasn't totally corrupt. He wanted Draco to fight for us… probably as a replacement spy in case something happened to Snape!"

"AND LOOK WHAT HAPPENED WITH SNAPE! HOW CAN YOU TRUST HIM WHEN HE BELIEVES THE SAME THING ABOUT YOU AS RIDDLE!?" Harry was practically spitting, so Hermione changed tact and adopted a softer tone. She couldn't possibly convince Harry of the truth, but…

"I don't know if he does anymore, Harry. He spilt his aunt's blood, her _pure_ blood, for me. I think he's struggling with it all. And, even if he wasn't, he still hates the hypocrisy of serving a mercurial halfblood, championing pureblood supremacy while abusing his family. Dumbledore didn't like the Russian sovetnik Rasputin, but he still fought with him against Grindelwald! This is Draco's fight too." She finished, in a voice of iron wrapped in pillows. Soft, but resolute.

Ron had moved physically to her side by this point and added in; "And he can't betray us if he's made an unbreakable vow… We can use him, he'd have to serve us, like a house elf." Hermione smarted at the comparison and the implications of it, but didn't contradict them. This was too important.

It was Harry's turn to abandon the questioning gaze of his friends, in favor of the cloudless horizon. When she followed it, Hermione could see what was so entrancing. The sun glinting off the channel brightened the water enough that it disappeared when it met the sky blue mirror of the horizon. She had never known it was possible for the Celtic Sea, essentially a glorified portion of the greater Atlantic, to adopt that light a color. It seemed as if the inky darkness of the deep had withdrawn, just for today, just long enough to show the Boy-who-too-much-was-asked-of how similar the sky and the sea could be. She held her breath as he turned back to them.

"Fine, then. We've wasted enough time on this already. You've got the vows prepared?"

* * *

The smile on his witch's face as she re-entered the house, with her two friends in tow, was worth enduring every uncomfortable attempt at social niceties made in her absence. William Weasley seemed to be torn between a wary eye and an almost amused smirk by his continued presence on the loveseat. Lovegood and Thomas had even attempted to make stilted conversation with him, which fit. In the handful of days he had inhabited the manor, he had ensured that they had been provided with blankets and regular meals. Really, there was no use keeping prisoners in the first place if they were liable to die of exposure and malnutrition at any given time, just avada them and be done with it- don't let them linger to incubate typhoid right next to your wine cellar.

No, the greatest source of hostility in the room was from William's halfbreed wife. Sure, the French veela was nice to look at, but Draco didn't know how any man could sleep soundly next to a woman who was eviscerating carrots as menacingly as she seemed intent on doing. It's not as if the pureblood had ever spent any great amount of time in his manor's kitchen, but he was sure that hacking a butcher's cleaver, from overhead down to the block with great swings that shook the counter was not how the orange, distractingly phallic shaped root vegetable, was normally prepared. He shrugged to himself, the man was probably a Gryffindor, and therefore, far more foolhardy than Draco, himself. Or maybe that was what one did when one married into as virile a family as the Weasley's but was not quite ready to become pregnant... Actually, that made sense.

It was these musings that Hermione interrupted as she bounded back into his life. The delight of success was evident on her features, it was in the secret smile she had settled in the sly corner of her face, between her chin and left dimple. She barely spared him a _(,inflamingly arousing,)_ glance before her eyes found the elder Weasley and she inquired, demurely; "Bill, I'm sure you're wondering what circumstances led to our prison break, and we're ever so thankful that you and Fluer have opened your home to us, but before we give you a full understanding of what we've been doing for the last year, I was wondering if you knew how to make an unbreakable vow?"

Bill blinked at the question, then nodded, adding; "I'm a cursebreaker, which necessitates knowing how things are bound together, yes. What did you have in mind?"

Hermione walked over to the cheap paperboard book cover that their pot of tea had been resting on, and produced the sheet of parchment she had left sticking out from the top, between the pages where she had found the oaths she intended to cite for framing.

It took a special type of swot to pack a mastery level compendium of post Roman Empire legal texts in her bag before embarking on a campaign in hostile territory, whilst being hunted for the crime of being born to a specific heritage, but with the express intent to supplant these with very real crimes against the state. The fact that the undetectable extension charm on aforementioned bag was definitely privately, and therefore illegally, applied was just the cream dollop in the center of the pie.

The cursebreaker had taken the proffered parchment and read it from top to bottom, at least twice. Then his grim, scar faced countenance broke into a feral grin. He looked like a wolf that had finally caught a hare on the open prairie. Then he fixed Draco in his gaze, and the gleam in his eyes sharpened. He looked ravenous. "Perfect. Ingenious idea, by the way, to use the offered format instead of the conditional one."

He was speaking to Hermione, but his eyes never left Draco, not once. Not a hare hunt, then… a ferret. What was this couple's issue with him? He'd have to remember to ask Hermione later.

The entire center of gravity in the room seemed to follow the man of the house's gaze. Both he and Hermione made their way to Draco, who leaned forward on his haunches and offered his right hand. Hermione took the parchment back from their bonder and shoved it into his outstretched fingers with a shake of her head.

"No, no- I'll have the arm you prefer to swear on, thank you very much."

He tried to rein in the sneer, he really did. The witch wanted to leave her mark on him, right over where the Dark Lord had. She had apparently taken his words to her in the early morning quite literally.

' _Fine then.'_ He laid the parchment down on the table in front of him, near the pot, and began to study the wording one last time as he unbuttoned and rolled up his left robe sleeve, then of the black oxford underneath it. He had favored the modern styled French robes since his brief foray into the muggle world, during that disastrous Quidditch World Cup. Actually, so did his father, and they both had started to embrace sartorial choices that could have been mistaken for muggle suits, save the length of the robe hems, which extended farther down the thigh than what he had worn that day.

He hears a gasp from someone, Thomas, he thinks, when the Dark Mark finally comes into view to the room. The taint of the mark that blemished his alabaster forearm might have sparked off a lynching there and then, if he hadn't found the space above the wrist suddenly clasped by short fingers, just slightly too stubby to be considered appropriately delicate for music.

Hermione twisted their arms together, so that the pale expanse of her forearm is facing up, and visible by the shoving of the fluffy, blue sleeve above her elbow. It's an intimate expanse of skin that his fingers wrap around, colored like tea with just a drop too much milk, but capped by the gauze below the very crook of her elbow, centimeters from his manicured fingernail.

The upward slope of his appraisal continued until he finally met her eyes. He's still seated, but she's forced her way in between the table and the loveseat, and the resulting proximity is intimate. Draco is sure at this moment, if he could tear his eyes away from the shadowed depths of her's, he'd be quite embarrassed by the sight they made. The entire room's disbelief needled hotly at his cheeks, but he resisted the urge to occlude. Let them witness the spectacle, the seeker had been in enough mid-air collisions to know that the only shameful thing to do when in front of the crowd was to try and pretend nothing was amiss after hitting the earth hard enough to snap bones in half.

Besides, this wasn't about them. The two stayed frozen, even when they felt the tip of Weasley's wand release concentric waves of magic across skin that had already erupted in gooseflesh. "You may begin."

Draco's only regret was not indulging in a quick sip of water before he did so.

"By my magic, I will be to Hermione Jean Granger faithful and true, and fight for all that she defends, and shun all that she shuns, according to the natural law, and according to the world's principles, and never, by will nor by force, by word nor by work, do ought of what is loathful to her; on condition that she keep me as I am willing to serve her cause, and all that fulfil that our agreement was, when I to her submitted and chose her will."

With the addition of every word that passed between them, heat he knew to be from a ball of fire ratcheted up and across their hands. By the final syllable, the warmth that blanketed their hands was almost blistering.

Hermione's eyes are black pits again, and he realizes that he can no longer tell their pulses apart from each other as they thundered under the heat from where their wrists met. Had he occluded, he might have missed that and thought the dilation to be rooted in the light that clawed at the bottom of his range of vision. The heat is almost unbearable now, but there's not a pain conceivable to Draco that would cause him to release her arm at that moment, as he waited for her acceptance.

"I vow to ask no service from you that might bring you dishonor… and to protect you as I would any friend. From this day, until the day I hold your oaths fulfilled, I swear it on my magic. Arise, Draco Lucius Malfoy."

You could have knocked him over with a quill.

The ball of flame had begun to pulse when she started, distorting and roiling, before issuing forth a thick tongue of fire that coiled from the pad of his third finger down to hers, encompassing all of the uncovered skin in between. The two additional vows she had woven into the beginning were neither necessary to the magic, nor previously agreed upon- and it showed in the marking. An open oath typically left a singular band, thicker than the conditional variant.

But the wide, white band that settled without a burning into his skin had two delicate lines in its interior, spun together like Celtic knot work. They caged, rather than framed the extremities of his Dark Mark. So he laughed. It was brief, but honest.

Then he found his feet again.

"Tell me, Granger, are you incapable of accepting a single act of subordination without offering reciprocity?"

She didn't answer him and, in fact, fled from her previous position, seemingly without sparing him another thought

He tried not to let her attempt at a shred of modesty smart.

Potter was the first one to recover with, "Besides Ron and Hermione, if you're not an Occlumens, please leave the room."

Thomas and Lovegood left, looking not particularly unhappy to be sent away, but the rest of the rest of the room remained, and they gathered around the kitchen table, where The-boy-who-thought-he-was-in-charge looked prepared to hold court.

Then he felt it.

Just a slight flicker of… something, not unlike a pebble in your shoe, or a wristwatch strapped a hole too tight.

He took the last seat at the conveniently proportioned table. Sat diagonal to him, was Hermione. He felt the flicker again, and it kaleidoscoped in sensation as she looked from one side of the table to the other.

"So, um, who knows what a Horcrux is?"

Potter's words cause the flicker to withdraw and change, less a warm pinch now… more like ice down the back of one's shirt. That was… a sensation he could understand. It felt like fear. He ignored the knowing gasps from the married Weasleys and starred Potter down.

"It seems that I'm the only one who isn't in the know."

Potter snorted outright at that.

"Sorry, the fact that you're the only person here who doesn't know about this piece of dark magic is hilarious, or at least deeply ironic. 'Mione, you can explain it best, I'm sure."

The flicker morphed again, then burned once more, as soon as Hermione looked at him.

"Well, a Horcrux is…"

The flicker was constant for the duration of their eye contact.

' _Interesting.'_


	4. Forever Reforged

It was… refreshing… to be able to converse about a piece of advanced magic with an avid listener, rather than a captive audience. The way Draco nodded at the appropriate points, asked questions (both clarifying and probing,) and expressed interest at referencing the pertinent source material was… refreshing.

It was appropriate for Hermione to find their kitchen table interaction refreshing… not stimulating, and certainly not thigh slickeningly, 'My God, please don't stain this nightgown, it was lent to me' arousing.

But that was the state she found herself in by the end of her explanation- about _h_ _orcruxes_ , no less. She had woken up like this, thinking of him. Really, had he not taken up such a regretful, truly misguided stance on house-elf rights, she might have embarrassed herself the moment she had taken those shackles off in the early morning.

But then, after being so thoroughly disagreeable about the problematic socialization aspect of house-elf enslavement practices, he had the nerve to be so, so…

' _Hermione'_

' _Bewitching'_

' _Overthrowing'_

' _Enthralling'_

...flattering. The man's command over the successful application of an adjective was simply unparalleled. Hermione rubbed her thighs together again.

"I'll need a shower...I'm feeling, well, I need a shower, Harry."

Her best friend looked at her and nodded, "We'll wait until you're ready, then."

She launched up from the table as if her seat was on fire, without sparing another person a glance.

"'Mione!" Ron's voice called her back to the witnesses to her shame, just as she had made the door. His outstretched hand was offering her beaded bag. Loyal, trustworthy man. She grabbed it with a muttered thanks, and fled to the loo, where she finally released the breath she had been holding when the great gush of it could be covered by the heavy falling of the hot shower.

It seemed as if their friendship had gone largely unaffected by her rejection of the red head, last night. He had been downright supportive of her during her persuasion of Harry, and had appealed to reason instead of blind emotions... Although, in his binary emotional spectrum, she supposed that his fear of Voldemort far outweighed his distaste of Malfoy.

She wondered how that might change if he knew that Malfoy had put his hands on her.

' _Put his hands on me'_. That was a fanciful manner of describing the contact between the two of them, which had never exceeded his hands on her wrists, or the occasional bump of their knees on the loveseat.

She guffawed at the thought as she ripped the gauze and poultice off and deposited them in the bin, before vanishing the pile completely. The _**M**_ on her arm had already scabbed over angrily, and the muggleborn investigated the other new scars she had voluntarily added to limb. The knotted banding was striking, in a nordic way. It looped around the outside of her arm, absent on the inside, but continuing again on its rotation where hair appeared on the other side of the appendage, finally terminating with mocking precision in line with the _**M**_.

Helen Granger would have been aghast, but Hermione imagined that retired Sergeant Richard Granger would have inspected the final design with morbid approval. After all, he himself had the Royal Marines insignia tattooed only slightly higher than her new body modification. Still, she mourned the loss of short sleeve options for her eventual wedding day… ' _Ridiculous.'_

Perhaps she was still experiencing the aftereffects of her brief imprisonment.

She pulled the borrowed nightgown above her head, and forced herself to study the evidence of her shame. ' _God above, let a tergeo be effective enough, please don't necessitate a scourgify.'_ The stain removing charm was much preferred to the harsher cleansing charm for fabrics.

The stain lifted. Thank God and Merlin for small miracles. She laid out a stack of denim, matching undergarments, camisole and a pink zip up; wondered if that was really the nicest top she could manage, shook her head vigorously to disabuse herself of the notion that she should dress up for anyone, then stepped under the hot water.

To her immediate regret, the steaming torrent slapped rivulets down the slope of her curves and against the tips of her breasts. The knowledge that her boys were waiting for her to begin planning was the only reason she didn't press her hand against the even hotter need between her legs.

By the time she had returned to the corridor where Malfoy, Ron and Harry had been lurking, Harry and Malfoy were already sniping at each other over the late Dumbledore. Harry looked incensed, but Ron was refusing to defend Dumbledore's memory. Rather than join the growing coalition against him, she simply seized the moment by catching Harry's eye and asking, "So, who first?"

"Ollivander… definitely Ollivander." He didn't wait for her response, and led them into the room where the aged man was on bedrest. He wasn't alone, Dean and Luna were seated at his side, looking out at the ocean and talking quietly. Harry didn't seem to feel bad about running them out of this room too, and barely waited to hear the door close behind them before he started his interrogation.

Ron had been right last night, Harry was off. He'd been a deft hand at wheedling information from reticent authority figures since she'd met him, but this current attempt was artless. It was tempting to write his ire off on Ollivander's inability to fix his holly wand, if it hadn't preceded the inquiry entirely. It was almost as if he was punishing himself for putting off questioning Slughorn for so long.

Still, the following insight into wandlore was priceless… and she was only mildly disgusted when she digested the ramifications of his brief tutorial on wand ownership. The muggleborn dug into her handbag and grasped the hateful length of wood before inquiring, "So, for instance, I took this wand from Bellatrix Lestrange's hand… so it should work for me?"

Ollivander's misty eyes appraised the wand, and she wondered, not for the first time, how close to blindness he was. He coaxed the curved instrument of their mutual torment from her grasp.

"That would depend very much on the circumstances surrounding the event… tell me, did you defeat her in combat before disarming her?"

She shook her head, but added for clarity's sake, "No, Malfoy did."

The wandmaker nodded in consideration, "Ah, disarmed by an ally then… but… on your behalf?" She nodded in return, but didn't trust her voice to keep her confidence.

"Have you cast with it since then?" She swallowed the saliva pooling in her mouth, and it inflicted a wave of nausea when it hit the pit of her stomach.

"Yes, one _Confringo_." The scent of burning flesh conjured by the memory caused the nausea to froth up her esophagus like heartburn. She desperately wished he'd abandon the line of questioning… but he didn't.

"Powerful magic, dark magic. It would not be a curse unfamiliar to this dragon heartstring… was it effective?" ' _Effective?'_ The taste of bile painted the back of her tongue, and she clamped her lips shut. Of course, Malfoy was the one to save her, again.

"Effective? I'd say so, she dropped a werewolf days before the full moon!" He delivered the answer in an incredulous drawl, then resumed his position of staring out the window. Harry and Ron looked aghast at the revelation, and it occurred to her that they thought Malfoy had been the one to kill Greyback. Hadn't even considered that it might have been her.

That she was now a murderer. She wanted to retch.

"Hmm, then that should be enough, I think. The wood might be unyielding, but it will service your will." That did it, she backpedalled immediately, distancing herself from the curved walnut as Ollivander tried to return it to her.

She caught Malfoy's worried look from across the bed, and by that point, even Harry seemed to have picked up on her discomfort as he intercepted the wand on her behalf. Malfoy set to work on opening the window behind him, before summoning her with a jerk of his head. She charged past the three boys, and sucked in the salt air greedily.

She was a murderer. She wondered what her mother would say.

"So, I wouldn't need to kill Hermione to win this wand from her, just disarm her, right?" While Malfoy held the window open and Ron had taken up a position beside her to rub soothing circles into the center of her back, Harry had plunged on ahead. Lovely.

Ollivander took the bait, and soon Harry had him divulging that he too, believed in the existence of the elder wand, and had even relayed such beliefs to Voldemort. Which should have been, at least existentially, distressing.

There was such a thing as the corporeal form of Death… Which meant that the existence of a higher power was probably not too far off from the human conception of it. Perhaps it was the vengeful God of Abraham that her parents and the Weasley's worshipped, and if that was the case, then she would probably have to account for her sins, for she was a murderer. She was probably the only member of the order that would have to testify to killing during the war… except for Malfoy, who had killed for her.

And had asked her to call him Draco, something she had been successful at up until the vow, as if it had reminded her of the distance between them again, which seemed foolish.

"Potter, where did you and the eldest Weasley stash my effects?" Her eyes had finally stopped watering enough to roll them, only Draco could be so pretentious.

"Is that really relevant right now, besides which, what makes you think I trust you with a wand?!" The angry response grounded her, in a way. She had a place here, and it was keeping Harry on course. She uncurled from around the windowsill and patted Ron's shoulder in thanks, trying to ignore the lovesick look she found on his face. ' _Just like a puppy.'_

"Harry, he can't hurt possibly hurt you, "fight for all she defends, never do ought that is loathful to her," remember?" That did nothing to assuage the look on his face, but Draco followed her up immediately.

"Yes, and on that note, I will need to request a boon from you, Mr. Ollivander, or I'll be next to useless in fulfilling my oaths." The wizened wandmaker simply gestured for him to continue, and Draco turned back to Harry and pressed again, "Potter, my effects?"

The black haired wizard didn't quite stomp the door, or slam it open, but he did growl out the summoning incantation that had a series of objects flying down the hallway and into his hands. He laid them out on the folded duvet, at the foot of the bed.

Draco wand, his father's walking stick, and a heavy silver ring were laid out, side by side, and the waxed canvas satchel with black leather trim was propped up against the post. He slid the silver ring onto the index finger of his right hand without any explanation, but then went for his father's walking stick instead of his wand. In fact, he seemed almost hesitant to let his hand stray close to the hawthorne wand, and had snatched up the black walking stick, capped on either end with goblin silver decorations. He spun it, almost experimentally, before wrapping his hand around the studded hilt below the open mouthed serpent, and separating it from the black haft. Then he began to speak, and although it was directed towards the wandmaker, his explanation was a subject of interest for the entirety of the room.

"As I'm sure you're aware by now, once you are in the Dark Lord's service, it is entirely impossible to escape it. Igor Karkaroff holds the record, I believe, of evading him for an entire calendar year before finally succumbing to the urge."

"The urge?" Ron's voice was leery, as if disgusted by his own curiosity. Harry answered before Draco had the chance to; "The urge to use magic, right? That's why you've waited until now to ask for your wand back, isn't it?" To Draco's credit, he simply inclined his head before saying, "Just so. It's quite simple, in its ingenuity. You see, the Dark Mark is a brand, not a scar. I won't recount the actual process but, first a general ritual of marking is burnt into the skin, then the Dark Lord makes his own specific imprint. For every ability it imparts, there are at least half a dozen tradeoffs in the Dark Lord's favor… but foremost among them is his capacity to find you when you cast magic. In open warfare, it gave him the ability to stay constantly abreast of his allies on the battlefield, and it also allowed him to scry deserters or meter out discipline if a Death Eater went to ground."

Ollivander looked on, growing ever more horrified as Draco described how unsafe he made the inhabitants of Shell Cottage by his continued presence, but Draco finished before Ron or Harry could erupt in angry questions.

"As you can imagine, my father, Lucius Malfoy, was not exactly thrilled to learn that he had been branded in a ritual not so different from the one his father favored to keep track of the family's abraxans. Almost immediately after the fall of the Dark Lord, he had this piece commissioned by a goblin silversmith that we've retained for some time, and a concealment charm had been fashioned into this snake. It might look like a vaunted family heirloom, but it's actually a more recent addition to the family than myself."

Ollivander still looked at the hawthorne wand distrustfully, "That should not be possible, if it is as you say. The individual magic of a wizard is quite distinctive, and that magic channeled through a wand core, incredibly more so."

Draco faltered for a moment, before handing the piece over to be examined. The wandmaker rolled the silver affectation between fingers as gnarled and knotted as Dumbledore's wand… the Elder Wand, before he started up again.

"It is, of course, tradition for the lord and ladies of high pureblood societies to fashion wand accoutrements of precious metals to the butt of their wands. I remember, it became all the rage in the nineteen twenties, following the first Great War, and never went out amongst the families of the Sacred Twenty Eight… It is not a service I offer, but I distinctly remember being curious that your father had forgone the embellishment until some time after he had fathered his first child… I only know this because I do not remember seeing your father touting this piece in Diagon Alley until, at least, four years after the fall of He-who-must-not-be-named… These emeralds set here, in the eye sockets- I suppose you haven't had the moment to have them appraised, have you?" His only answer was a rueful snort from the Malfoy scion.

"No, I didn't suppose so. Mr. Potter, if you would be so kind as to cast a _prior incantato_ on Mr. Malfoy's wand, over there?"

Harry pointed Bellatrix's wand tip at Draco's, adjusting instinctively to the pronounced curve of the weapon in his grip, and gave the incantation.

With a shudder, the hawthorne instrument began to regurgitate the ghost of Draco Malfoy's betrayal, starting with a series of summoning and potion brewing charms, punctuated finally with the flash of the _sectumsempra_.

Then, with a spring to his finger movements that Hermione could only place as excitement, did Ollivander begin to work. His digits extended, spider like across the bed as if it was a workshop table. Arranged in front of him in short order was the silver snake head, Draco's wand, and the black hafted body of the effect, which was tipped in a wicked spike of matching goblin silver. The master begged Bellatrix's wand back from Harry, and then began to cast.

The two-shaded hawthorne length jumped into the air with a swish and flick of Ollivander's wrist, and then he began to trace a complex series of squiggles in the air. The incantation that followed was muttered too low to hear, but with a start Hermione realized a linear rune matrix was being etched below the circular hilt of Draco's wand.

She could see, in the corner of her eye, the look of abject pain on his face.

The muggleborn did her best to squash the sympathy in her heart. This was a necessary process, and besides, she quite liked the vine patterned scrollwork that wrapped around her own. ' _Relax, trust that he wouldn't damage his own creation,'_ she thought, as if he could hear her. Then, to her immediate curiosity, he reacted as if he had. She returned her attention to the process rather than marvel at the coincidental timing of Draco's self soothing, and caught the very end of it.

With a second levitation charm, the snake head was brought up to level, and rotated so that the empty hole was poised to accept the waiting wand, causing Hermione to color at the odd thought. The inadvertent sexual imagery was apparently not lost on Draco, who broke the dour silence of the ritual with a cough. Ollivander was unperturbed, and with another swish and flick, brought the wand deep into the silver ornament, until the silver rested around the disk like hilt and the runes were completely covered. With a single tap, the two pieces became one, and Ollivander cast another _prior incantato_ on it.

To the amazement of all there to observe, the spell had revealed a completely different series of household charms, finally culminating in hexes, curses and shields that sparked a look of recognition on Harry's face.

"I remember those spells from the Department of Mysteries, two years ago."

Ollivander nodded and slid the wand home into the body of the walking stick as he continued, absentmindedly.

"Yes, you see, I only remembered the day I saw your father with this new staff because I thought it was curious that I should encounter him in public, only a week after the death of your grandfather, Abraxas Malfoy. I'm quite sure now that these emeralds are artificial, made alchemically with the remains of his body and wand. The familial ties between magical cores would explain how the magical signature of a wizard's casting could be disguised so completely, while still allowing for the production of powerful magic."

Draco leveled the assembled affectation a look like he expected it to weigh his hand down as it was passed back to him. Like it was heavier than its individual components of wood, metal and stones. Heavy with sin.

Hermione could empathize, but apparently the feeling was beyond a giddy Ollivander.

"Well, give it a wave!"

And then everyone in the room was eleven again, and the world wasn't so scary.

* * *

The conjured bouquet of narcissus, viking mums and baby's-breath was pretty, rather than meaningful. Still, the stated intention of a pure rebirth wasn't lost on Ollivander, who looked pleased with himself as it became clear that the wand hadn't given Shell Cottage's location away to the Dark Lord.

Hermione clearly appreciated the bouquet, and looked mournfully at it when they were left at the elderly man's bedside.

Lucius had always said that a good flower conjuring could make or break a courtship… and Draco was reminded of his father now, more than ever, as he ran one thumb against his signet ring and the other against his concealed wand.

Potter was leading again, and moved from room to room like a wraith. The hooknose didn't know what hit him.

"I need to speak to you about the contents of Bellatrix Lestrange's vault." Hermione and even Weasley blanched at their fearless leader's lack of tact, but the goblin's eyes just glittered in dark vindication.

"And to think, I had thought that you, perhaps, were above such things." Scarhead settled in across from the goblin, and took a shaky breath before continuing.

"I need to know if she has any treasures that belonged to Rowena Ravenclaw or Helga Hufflepuff. It's important." At this, the goblin simply tutted, "Important to wand-carriers, perhaps."

Hermione took exception to that, "Important to any that oppose You-know-who and his followers!" The flicker was back, like an insistent pinch above his shoulder blades, at the nape of his neck, now.

He had already decided when she had disappeared into the loo that his magic was simply chafing as it was caught between the contrary bindings of his new oaths and his old ones, but he remained curious about the sensation.

It had been a discomfort all morning, reaching a zenith of irritation when he had asked Hermione about Herpo the Foul, who, Draco had thought prior to this morning's conversation, had made his largest contributions in experimental magic when he had successfully pioneered the breeding of basilisks.

It seemed irritation was catching, "Important how?" the goblin continued to question. "Important… to who?"

"To me, to the Order!" Potter snarled out, then steadied himself again. "It contains… a weapon that he is weak to." Draco thought it was a rather poor lie, and the banker clearly agreed.

"What weapon could you desire more than the sword of Godric Gryffindor? I know that the one in the Lestrange family vault is fake, so I would presume the one you are in possession of to be the genuine article."

Harry swung around in his seat, irritated by the prevarication, before ultimately relenting. "Our sword is real, we tested it… It's the same one I pulled from the sorting hat when I was twelve. Look, I'm not lying; the artifacts from the other Hogwarts founders are weapons. But they're _his_ weapons. The sword is the key to destroying them… so you see, that's why Hermione lied to Bellatrix. She can't know we have the real one, because we haven't had the opportunity to use it yet."

The goblin's anger seemed to come down to a simmer before he stated, "If it is your intention to steal from one of the oldest vaults entrusted to Gringotts, then I assure you that you are sadly deluded. Such a thing has never been done before."

Harry leveled him a wicked smile, as if he was a parent who had caught a child in a fib. "But that's not true, is it? Someone infiltrated Gringotts six and a half years ago, on the day we met, isn't that right, Griphook?"

Potter knew the goblin?

"That vault was empty!" Griphook seemed to take the professional question as an attack on his personal pride, and perhaps it was, for the bankers of Gringotts.

"Only because I helped empty it that morning… but it is possible. And with the help of a former banker of Gringotts, I'll bet even we could do it." But this argument only incurred further jeering from Griphook.

"I left my position at Gringotts because I refused to bend the knee to wand-bearers. How could you possibly believe you could persuade me to betray the code of my race?" He looked as if he was about to dismiss them from his presence entirely, when Weasley finally took his crack at it.

"Look here, it's not as if you get nothing from this. You must want revenge on Lestrange and You-know-who for torturing you, and causing you to lose your job in the first place; so unless you plan on leaving Britain, you don't have much of a choice- cuz it's not like they're going anywhere if we can't get into that vault." Potter and Granger looked floored. Draco almost occluded to hide his reaction to the argument's coherency.

Griphook sputtered, and seemed to lurch like a flyer who had slipped from his broom, still in motion, but for no reason in particular. It was a long moment before anyone in the room recovered enough to continue.

"That is not the point, my personal welfare is hardly enough to persuade me to forgo the honor of my people." The peculiarities of the phrasing spurned Draco to enter the dialogue now.

"Ah, but Weasley has gotten you to admit that you're receptive to the premise of the bargain; now we are simply haggling over price."

The wizard looked almost thankful for the support. He imagined the redhead suffered from a dearth of practicality whenever thorny ethical issues like this emerged in the trio. The goblin sneered, but gestured for him to continue with longed, clawed fingers. ' _Typical.'_ Taking advantage of a goblin's avarice was so elementary that he could have polled a group of third year Slytherin's for his next move.

"I am in possession of the key to the Malfoy family vault. Both are in the French quarter of the Sacred Twenty Eight, and are quite close together. In it are stored artifacts so old that they predate the establishment of Britain itself, many of which are Goblin made." He flashed the similarly old signet ring for effect. The answering smile looked as if he had hooked a thumb in the corners of the Griphook's mouth and wrenched upwards.

"Mr. Malfoy, are you offering to me, as the muggles would say, a blank cheque?" Draco was only surprised that the creature was able to annunciate so eloquently whilst still bearing every. single. tooth.

"No, I'm offering you a choice of a single relic of equal value from my family vault of the same era, that being prior to the Norman incursion of William the Conqueror." Draco said, being extremely judicious with his word choice.

Griphook's black eyes shone like the greed in his very core had been set on fire, from the inside, out. Draco decided that it was an expression he was decidedly uncomfortable with.

"But how can you assure me that there is any object of equal value in the Malfoy vault to a Hogwarts founder? Who, after all, left priceless little in private estate that wasn't willed directly to the institution, between the four of them?"

Draco couldn't, actually he was counting on it. The greatest treasures of that era were the personal effects of Armand Malfoy, and they were sitting on display in his father's study. Actually, that was the Lord's study… his study now. He huffed indignantly before beginning.

"I am the Lord of the Malfoy's of Wiltshire, entitled to reclaim the Earldom of Wiltshire from the muggle Marquess of Winchester, if I should so care to. We are the only magical family whose ancestral seat was granted directly by the hand of William the Conqueror, and if you think that four upstarts of, I'll permit, significant magical talent, left behind items of greater value than could be found in the holdings of a family that traces its lineage reliably from the fall of the Roman Empire- during a period of time when they aided in the subjugation of the Anglo-Saxonic druids, as well as the bloody rest of England- than I don't know why we are wasting our time conversing."

Potter snorted.

Weasley actually rolled his eyes.

Hermione was unreadable, although his pronouncement had been underlined by the same pain level as her exposition on the, regrettably second hand, accounts of Herpo the Foul's horcrux experiments.

Griphook however, was well within the fevered grip of this negotiation now, and countered immediately; "Yes, I'm sure your family eagerly recalls being raised to the peerage as a conciliatory prize after being stopped short of Scotland by the four wizards you so denigrate."

Draco's eyes narrowed. ' _Ah,'_ so that was his angle... He wanted the sword, which presented a terrible key-for-lock exchange. The shite was volleying back and forth so that Draco would offer greater and greater sums, until finally the item the goblin actually desired would seem a pittance in comparison. It had almost worked too.

"I know what you're playing at, and you can't have it; the sword. We've already told you we have further need of it, and, furthermore, have no right to give it to you." His pronouncement was accompanied by three distinct gasps, but none of them came from the banker.

Griphook responded through a great gnashing of teeth; "My people have every right to it! It was stolen from Ragnuk the First by Godric Gryffindor and-" Draco attacked.

"It was forged by Ragnuk the First for Godric Gryffindor, specifically to pierce the goblin silver plate that Armand Malfoy was armored in during the campaign." Never had he been so thankful for his father's incessant lectures, and the goblin's response sounded like it came from between teeth that could grind flour.

"You have no proof of this claim…" ' _Idiot.'_ Draco didn't even attempt to resist the sneer.

"Have you seen it? The wizard's bleeding name is inscribed down the fuller! Unless you're insinuating that the greatest goblin smith of the age produced a blade that was not _impervious to all that wouldn't strengthen it?_ That most basic principle of your craft?"

"It is a masterpiece of goblin metallurgy, and was due to return to us the moment of his death!" Now, Draco chose to end the argument by raising his voice in return.

"An accord that was most assuredly violated when Ragnuk sent a party of his subjects to steal it from Godric's Hollow while the man still lived! Or did you forget that he so thoroughly humiliated them, that he bewitched them to return to Ragnuk's court, where they were imperiused to relay the threat of a dynastic reckoning if Ragnuk ever attempted it again. I can't imagine you forgot that bit, the shame of it fueled an entire rebellion six centuries later! The farce of it, as if there was any honor in stealing from the endowment of schoolchildren." Draco oscillated to channeling his mother as he finished, looking at Griphook like a dragonhide boot toe that he'd somehow managed to scuff.

He was of the opinion that the closest a goblin could feel to shame was regret for missing an opportunity, and banked on Griphook retreating backwards to the previous offer. The miserly wretch validated his presuppositions with a final growl.

"One item from the Malfoy vault then, goblin-worked and of my choosing, from before William the First sat on the throne." The clawed fingers of his hand reached out, but Draco looked over to Hermione first, for confirmation.

When she realized that he was waiting for her to approve the exchange, she nodded so rapidly that her curls bounced.

"We have an accord then." He wrapped his fingers around the Goblin's hand and shook.

Now, if that flicker would just go away… for Salazar's sake, it felt like someone was digging the sword of Gryffindor directly into his spine.

* * *

**AN: Ah, the great deathly mcguffin hunt. It's a bit difficult to spin thematic messages into treasure hunts, but J.K. gives us a wealth of material to work with. Also, in rereading the pertinent chapters, I found that writing an endgame Harry that hasn't suffered Dobby's death changes the trajectory of the plot immensely! What do we think? Am I playing into my childish urge to rest the prose too heavily on the physical significance of items, or did it flow well enough? Was the Dramione bond subplot too overt, or not apparent enough? All of the details on the sword were taken directly from Pottermore, btw.**

**Switching gears for a second. I pumped this chapter out much quicker than usual because of the vicious series of attacks on both ada_p_rix and Onyx_ &_Elm. Both are far superior authors to me, and I take any attack on the ship as a personal insult. I've gone into far greater depths about this on reddit, which is the only way I normally interact with the greater community, under the same name.**

**Suffice to say, part of the ship, part of the crew. Drop them a note of support, and leave a review on your favorite WIP this week; you never know who the hashtag touting zoomers will come for next.**


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